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.
Franklin P. Adams
Nixon Waterman
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Franklin Pierce Adams, known almost everywhere in print by the compact and memorable signature “F. P. A.,” was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 15 November 1881, and died in New York City on 23 March 1960. During the first half of the twentieth century, he became one of America’s most recognizable newspaper humorists, a poet of urbane light verse, an editor, anthologist, critic, and central presence in the literary soci…
“To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.”
In the golden age of American newspaper poetry, when verses appeared on editorial pages alongside the day's news and readers clipped favorite stanzas to paste in scrapbooks, few voices resonated more warmly with the reading public than that of Nixon Waterman. Born on November 12, 1859, in the small prairie town of Newark, Illinois, Waterman would rise from humble agricultural beginnings to become one of the most wide…
About 88 km separate Chicago, Illinois, USA from Newark, Illinois, USA. Both have ground in Illinois.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
Franklin P. Adams: chicago, new york city, f. p. a., baseball's sad lexicon, the conning tower, algonquin round table, in cupid's court, tobogganing on parnassus. Nixon Waterman: newark, illinois, creston, iowa, chicago herald, small change, a rose to the living, opinion columns, ben king's verse, some home-made poems.
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.
Franklin P. Adams: Irony, Longing, Sorrow. Nixon Waterman: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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