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 Drummond
John Drinkwater
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 Drummond of Hawthornden was born on 13 December 1585 at Hawthornden, the family estate overlooking the River Esk near Lasswade in Midlothian, and died there on 4 December 1649. He belongs among the most accomplished Scottish poets of the early seventeenth century, though his reputation has long been complicated by the apparent contradictions in his work and character. He was a Scottish laird who wrote chiefly…
“A friend is a second self.”
John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…
“The answer in itself now makes a large and distinguished literature to which, full as it is of keen intelligence and even of constructive vision, we can return with unstaling pleasure.”
About 521 km separate Hawthornden, Midlothian, Scotland from Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
William Drummond: hawthornden, midlothian, teares on the death of meliades, poems: amorous, funerall, divine, pastorall, forth feasting, edmund spenser, sir philip sidney, wars of the three kingdoms. John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
William Drummond: Sorrow, Spirituality, Wonder. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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