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 Cullen Bryant
Laurence Binyon
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 Cullen Bryant was born on 3 November 1794 in the rural hill town of Cummington, Massachusetts, and died in New York City on 12 June 1878. During his unusually long life, he became several things at once: one of the earliest American poets to command serious respect at home and abroad, a formidable editor whose newspaper helped shape national political opinion, a translator of Homer, a civic reformer, and a pu…
“This is the enthusiasm that is the parent of poetry.”
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“Perhaps no people has ever been stirred by a great idea till that idea was animated and made memorable by finding its right expression in rhythmical phrase.”
About 5,121 km separate Cummington, Massachusetts, USA from Lancaster, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
William Cullen Bryant: cummington, thanatopsis, frances fairchild, new york city, the ages, romanticism, peter bryant, the fountain and other poems. Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon.
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 Cullen Bryant: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.
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