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
W. H. Davies
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.”
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“Whatever the consequence might be, even if this rough life threatened to injure my health permanently, I was firmly resolved to sacrifice the next six months for whatever might follow them.”
About 198 km separate Lambeth, London, England from Newport, Wales. 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. W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp.
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. W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.