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.
William Rose Benét
Robert Bridges
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Rose Benét was born on 2 February 1886 at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 4 May 1950 in New York City. During his lifetime he became known as a poet, editor, critic, anthologist, essayist, novelist in verse, and tireless popularizer of literature. He belonged to a family unusually rich in literary talent: his younger brother was the poet and novelist Stephen Vincent Benét, author of John Brow…
“If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her.”
Robert Seymour Bridges was born on 23 October 1844 at Walmer, near Deal in Kent, into a prosperous and cultivated English family whose security gave him both educational opportunity and, eventually, the independence to pursue literature without needing to earn his living from it. He was the fourth son of John Thomas Bridges and Harriet Elizabeth Bridges. His father had served in the navy and later held administrative…
“To educate means to draw out, and if we are to seek to draw out the human mind we must first have some clear notion as to what the mind is like.”
About 5,690 km separate Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, New York, USA from Walmer, Kent, England. 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.
William Rose Benét: fort hamilton, brooklyn, stephen vincent benét, merchants from cathay, perpetual light, the skater of ghost lake, the great white wall, the burglar of the zodiac. Robert Bridges: walmer, eton college, corpus christi college, gerard manley hopkins, the growth of love, london snow, st bartholomew's hospital, hospital for sick children.
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.
William Rose Benét: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Robert Bridges: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.
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