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 Edward Burghardt Du Bois
William Stanley Braithwaite
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 Edward Burghardt Du Bois entered the world on February 23, 1868, in the small, rolling hills of Great Barrington, Massachusetts—a town where the air carried the crisp scent of New England pines and the quiet rhythms of rural life. Born into a family of mixed African, Dutch, and French Huguenot heritage, he was the son of Alfred Du Bois, a restless barber and laborer of Haitian descent who soon vanished from t…
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”
William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite entered the world on December 6, 1878, in Boston, Massachusetts, a city pulsing with literary ambition and the lingering echoes of abolitionist fervor. He departed it on June 8, 1962, at his home on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, New York, after a brief illness, at the age of eighty-three. In the eighty-three years between those dates, Braithwaite forged a remarkable life as poet, cr…
“These new talents were new roots in a soil not too richly fertilized by the chemistry of original song.”
About 191 km separate Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Massachusetts.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois: great barrington, alfred du bois, mary silvina burghardt, fisk university, the souls of black folk, double consciousness, color line, niagara movement. William Stanley Braithwaite: boston, massachusetts, harlem, new york, emma kelly, lyrics of life and love, the house of falling leaves, anthology of magazine verse, spingarn medal, atlanta university.
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 Edward Burghardt Du Bois: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. William Stanley Braithwaite: Joy, Wonder, Peace.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.