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.
Clifford Bax
Stephen Phillips
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the landscape of early twentieth-century English letters, few figures embodied such versatility and contradiction as Clifford Lea Bax. Born on July 13, 1886, in Upper Tooting, south London, into an affluent family that would nurture two remarkable artistic talents, Bax lived until November 18, 1962, leaving behind a body of work that, while often overshadowed by more celebrated contemporaries, offers a fascinating…
“Poetry is the attempt of human speech to catch the movement of the eternal.”
Stephen Phillips, born on 28 July 1864 and dead at the distressingly early age of fifty-one on 9 December 1915, was one of the most celebrated English poets and verse dramatists of the years around 1900. For a brief but dazzling period, he seemed to many readers and theatre-goers to be the writer most likely to renew English poetic drama after Tennyson and Browning. His plays filled theatres, his poetry was widely re…
About 85 km separate Lambeth, London, England from Summertown, Oxford, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Clifford Bax: upper tooting, hampstead, theosophy, william butler yeats, twenty chinese poems, poems dramatic and lyrical, the school of plato, woodland wisdom. Stephen Phillips: summertown, oxford, cicely chilcott, paolo and francesca, christ in hades, marpessa, trinity college cambridge, verse drama revival.
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.
Clifford Bax: Longing, Peace, Tenderness. Stephen Phillips: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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