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.
Raymond Garfield Dandridge
John McCrae
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Raymond Garfield Dandridge emerged from the working-class streets of Cincinnati’s Price Hill neighborhood as one of the most resilient and distinctive voices in early twentieth-century African American poetry. Born around 1882 in a modest home that overlooked the rolling hills and river valleys of southern Ohio, he lived a life defined by both vibrant physical promise and profound physical limitation. By the time he…
“Tis good to make the best of it.”
John McCrae was born on 30 November 1872 in Guelph, Ontario, then a prosperous and growing town in Canada’s province of Ontario. He died on 28 January 1918 at Wimereux, France, before the war that made his name famous had ended. In the short span between those dates, he became several things at once: physician, medical teacher, pathologist, soldier, officer, friend, and poet. To later generations he is overwhelmingly…
“It is a poem of war, and I hope it will be of some use.”
About 609 km separate Cincinnati, Ohio, USA from Guelph, Ontario, Canada. 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.
Raymond Garfield Dandridge: price hill, penciled poems, the poet and other poems, zalka peetruza, paul laurence dunbar, harlem renaissance, hemiplegia, ellen c. dandridge. John McCrae: guelph, ontario, in flanders fields, second boer war, canadian field artillery, alexis helmer, victorian ideals, royal victoria hospital.
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.
Raymond Garfield Dandridge: Sorrow, Despair, Spirituality. John McCrae: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.