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.
Herbert Sherman Gorman entered the world in 1893 in Springfield, Massachusetts, a bustling industrial city nestled along the Connecticut River, where the hum of factories and the clang of railroads shaped the rhythms of daily life. Though the precise day of his birth remains unrecorded in many accounts, his arrival coincided with an America on the cusp of modernity, one foot still planted in the Victorian era and the…
“Courage in a writer is the willingness to follow a line of thought wherever it leads, regardless of popular approval.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon on 13 June 1888 and died there on 30 November 1935, leaving behind a body of work so various, unfinished, and deliberately dispersed among invented authors that it altered the possibilities of modern literature. During his lifetime he published relatively little in book form and knew neither broad public fame nor financial ease. After his death, however, the vast ar…
“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
They overlapped for 43 years (1893–1935).
When Herbert Gorman was born, Fernando Pessoa was about 5.
Herbert Gorman was about 42 when Fernando Pessoa died.
About 5,261 km separate
Springfield, Massachusetts, USA from
Lisbon, Portugal.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Herbert Gorman:
springfield massachusetts, new york city, jean wright gorman, the barcarole of james smith, the procession of masks, the peterborough anthology, james joyce, a passage to india.
Fernando Pessoa:
lisbon, heteronyms, mário de sá-carneiro, orpheu, alberto caeiro, álvaro de campos, ricardo reis, durban.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
