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…
“True rebellion in literature does not consist in noise, but in the quiet insistence on seeing reality without blinders.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Decadent Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Waverley Turner Carmichael emerged from the red clay of Alabama’s Black Belt like a quiet song rising unbidden from the soil itself. Born in 1881 in the small community of Snow Hill, in Wilcox County, he would become one of the most authentic voices of rural African American life in the early twentieth century. His poetry, written in the rich dialect of the Southern Black folk he knew so intimately, captured the humo…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Devotional Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets
They overlapped for 44 years (1893–1936).
When Herbert Gorman was born, Waverley Turner Carmichael was about 12.
Herbert Gorman was about 43 when Waverley Turner Carmichael died.
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.
Waverley Turner Carmichael:
alabama, snow hill, black belt, from the heart of a folk, james holly hanford, 92nd infantry division, buffaloes, world war i.
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.
