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.
Ernest Hemingway
Charles Williams
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb west of Chicago, and died on 2 July 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho. He became one of the most recognizable writers of the twentieth century: novelist, short-story master, journalist, war correspondent, celebrity, sportsman, and, in his earliest publications, a poet. His name came to signify a style as much as a body of work. Hemingway…
“Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part.”
On a crisp September morning in 1886, in the shabby-genteel precincts of Holloway, North London, Charles Walter Stansby Williams entered a world that would never quite know what to make of him. The only son of Richard Walter Stansby Williams and Mary Wall, young Charles was born into circumstances that trembled on the edge of respectability. His father, a journalist and foreign business correspondent who wrote in Fre…
“I am the least of God’s creatures, but I have done something in my time, and I only did it through having suffered. Two or three times in my life I have felt I should really go off my head; did I? No; and beyond all my beliefs the result is greater than anything. Adored always be the Omnipotence.”
About 6,362 km separate Oak Park, Illinois, USA from Islington, London, 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.
Ernest Hemingway: oak park, ketchum, agnes von kurowsky, hadley richardson, pauline pfeiffer, lost generation, the sun also rises, a farewell to arms. Charles Williams: st albans, oxford university, florence conway, c.s. lewis, t.s. eliot, the silver stair, war in heaven, descent into hell.
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.
Ernest Hemingway: Irony, Sorrow, Despair. Charles Williams: Tenderness, Longing, Joy.
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