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.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
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.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson was born in Hexham, Northumberland, on 2 June 1878, and died on 26 May 1962. During a long career that began in the shadow of late Victorian romanticism and continued through two world wars, he became one of the most distinctive English poets of the early twentieth century. He has often been placed, sometimes too conveniently, among the Georgian poets: writers associated with clear language, nat…
“My essential autobiography is told in my verse.”
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…
“It is not essential that the subject-matter should represent or be like anything in nature; only it must be alive with a rhythmic vitality of its own.”
About 112 km separate Hexham, Northumberland, England from Lancaster, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: hexham, northumberland, georgian poets, daily bread, the stonefolds, fires, geraldene townshend, rupert brooke. 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.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.
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