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.
James Weldon Johnson
Fenton Johnson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
James Weldon Johnson entered the world on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, a bustling port city where the St. Johns River met the Atlantic and where the scars of Reconstruction still lingered in the humid air. He left it on June 26, 1938, in a car accident near Wiscasset, Maine, at the age of sixty-seven, his body laid to rest in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Between those dates stretched a life of astonish…
“The Negro is the only race in the world that has a song.”
In the sunlit streets of late-19th-century Chicago, where the Great Lakes breezes carried the promise of industry and the distant echoes of Southern migrations, Fenton Johnson entered the world on May 7, 1888. He would leave it on September 17, 1958, in the same city that had cradled his ambitions and tested his spirit, his seventy years a testament to the restless genius of an artist who refused to be confined by th…
About 1,391 km separate Jacksonville, Florida, USA from Chicago, Illinois, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
James Weldon Johnson: jacksonville, florida, harlem renaissance, lift ev'ry voice and sing, grace nail, the autobiography of an ex-colored man, fifty years and other poems, the book of american negro poetry, god's trombones. Fenton Johnson: chicago, harlem renaissance, elijah johnson, jesse taylor johnson, a little dreaming, visions of the dusk, songs of the soil, tired.
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.
James Weldon Johnson: Sorrow, Wonder, Longing. Fenton Johnson: Sorrow, Despair, Peace.
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