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
Philip James Bailey
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.”
Philip James Bailey was born in Nottingham on 22 April 1816 and died there on 6 September 1902, after a long life in which one early work made him, for a time, one of the most discussed poets in the English-speaking world. His name is now chiefly attached to Festus, the immense dramatic poem first published in 1839, but Bailey’s career was more than the history of a single Victorian bestseller. It was the history of…
About 5,645 km separate Guelph, Ontario, Canada from Nottingham, 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.
John McCrae: guelph, ontario, in flanders fields, second boer war, canadian field artillery, alexis helmer, victorian ideals, royal victoria hospital. Philip James Bailey: nottingham, thomas bailey, anne reed, universalist theology, romantic poetry, benjamin carpenter, the angel world, the mystic.
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. Philip James Bailey: Peace, Joy, Wonder.
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