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.
Leonard Bacon
Howard Phelps Putnam
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Leonard Bacon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, translator, and critic, was a figure whose life and work embodied the enduring power of traditional verse to illuminate the absurdities, adventures, and quiet profundities of the human condition. Born at the close of the nineteenth century and passing in the middle of the tumultuous twentieth, he navigated an era of literary upheaval with a steadfast commitment…
“I knew I wanted to write poetry and nothing but poetry.”
Howard Phelps Putnam was born in 1894 in Allston, Massachusetts, then a distinctly suburban and semi-rural part of Boston, and died on July 3, 1948, in Jamaica Plain. He belonged to the generation of American writers formed between the confident cultural inheritance of the nineteenth century and the disillusioning modernity of the First World War. His reputation never became as large as those of several Yale contempo…
About 423 km separate Syracuse, New York, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, 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.
Leonard Bacon: solvay, new york, peace dale, rhode island, sunderland capture, pulitzer prize, the scrannel pipe, autolycus, montana cattle trails, eureka ranch. Howard Phelps Putnam: allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét.
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.
Leonard Bacon: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear.
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