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.
John McCrae
Douglas Malloch
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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.”
Douglas Malloch was born on 5 May 1877 in Muskegon, Michigan, a city whose identity had been built in large measure from timber, water, sawmills, ships, and the difficult labor of turning northern forests into the materials of American expansion. He died on 2 July 1938, leaving behind a body of verse that was once widely circulated in newspapers, trade journals, recitation books, schoolrooms, and inspirational anthol…
“The difference between a stepping-stone and a stumbling block is how high you raise your foot.”
About 486 km separate Guelph, Ontario, Canada from Muskegon, Michigan, USA. 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.
John McCrae: guelph, ontario, in flanders fields, second boer war, canadian field artillery, alexis helmer, victorian ideals, royal victoria hospital. Douglas Malloch: muskegon, lumbermen's poet, be the best of whatever you are, the passing of the pine, great lakes region, american lumberman, progressive era, regional poet.
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.
John McCrae: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Douglas Malloch: Joy, Peace, Tenderness.
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