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.
Wallace Stevens stands as one of the most enigmatic and profound voices in American poetry—a philosophical poet who balanced a successful corporate career with the creation of some of the most intellectually challenging and aesthetically innovative verse of the 20th century. His poetry, characterized by its luxuriant language, philosophical depth, and preoccupation with the imagination's relationship to reality, cont…
“One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets, Symbolist Poets
In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…
“We are so impressed by the power of poetry that we think of it as something made by a wonderful and unusual person: we do not realize that all the wonder and marvel is in our own brains, that the poet is ourselves.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, War Poets
They overlapped for 52 years (1893–1944).
When Robert Nichols was born, Wallace Stevens was about 14.
Wallace Stevens was about 65 when Robert Nichols died.
About 5,685 km separate
Reading, Pennsylvania, USA from
Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Wallace Stevens:
reading, pennsylvania, harvard university, george santayana, harmonium, sunday morning, the emperor of ice-cream, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, the snow man.
Robert Nichols:
shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
