Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Dorothy Parker
C. P. Cavafy
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild on 22 August 1893 and dead on 7 June 1967, became one of the most recognizable voices of twentieth-century American letters: a poet of compressed heartbreak, a theater and book critic of dangerous precision, a short-story writer of unusual psychological acuity, a screenwriter, and a public political dissenter. For much of her life, she was treated as the emblem of a particular…
“What fresh hell can this be?”
Constantine Peter Cavafy, universally known as C. P. Cavafy, was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, on 29 April 1863, and died there on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday. The coincidence has naturally encouraged a Cavafian reading of his life: a date returning with a measured inevitability, an ending that seems to complete a private design. Yet Cavafy’s achievement was anything but neat or pr…
“I have no objection to being called a historical poet.”
About 8,866 km separate West End, New Jersey, USA from Alexandria, Egypt. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Dorothy Parker: manhattan, algonquin hotel, jazz age, edwin pond parker ii, enough rope, sunset gun, death and taxes, vanity fair. C. P. Cavafy: alexandria, greek diaspora, anglo-egyptian war, peter john cavafy, haricleia georgaki cavafy, the god abandons antony, waiting for the barbarians, che fece... il gran rifiuto.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Dorothy Parker: Irony, Sorrow, Despair. C. P. Cavafy: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.