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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.
In the pantheon of American letters, Thomas Bailey Aldrich occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully celebrated, he stands as a bridge figure between the rough-hewn democracy of antebellum American literature and the refined aestheticism that would characterize the Gilded Age. Born into a nation still finding its literary voice and dying in an America confidently asserting its cultural sophistication, A…
“The fool and his bookplate are soon parted.”
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 decision that the material used at one occurrence of the poetic mood shall be related to the material used at the next is not in itself an operation of the purely poetic energy, but of another.”
About 5,204 km separate Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA 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.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich: portsmouth, new hampshire, new orleans, lilian woodman, the bells: a collection of chimes, the ballad of babie bell, shiloh: a requiem, the story of a bad boy, james russell lowell. 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.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich: Longing, Wonder, Peace. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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