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 David Corrothers entered the world on July 2, 1869, in Cass County, Michigan, a place where the winds off Lake Michigan carried echoes of freedom from the Underground Railroad routes that had once snaked through its forests and fields. He left it far too soon, on February 12, 1917, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, felled by a stroke at the age of forty-seven while serving a Presbyterian congregation. In the brief…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emanuel Morgan occupies one of the most unusual positions in American literary history: he was a poet who never existed in the ordinary biographical sense, yet whose poems, reputation, controversies, and afterlife have proved remarkably real. The dates commonly attached to him, 1916–1917, refer not to the span of a human life but to the brief public career of a deliberately invented authorial persona. “Emanuel Morgan…
James D. Corrothers:
cass county, south haven, muskegon, t. thomas fortune, w. e. b. du bois, the black cat club, psalm of the race, the snapping of the bow.
Emanuel Morgan:
spectrism, witter bynner, arthur davison ficke, santa fe, harvard university, tao te ching, mock avant-garde, poetry society of america.
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.