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.
Ford Madox Hueffer
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.
Ford Madox Hueffer, who later became Ford Madox Ford, was born on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey, then a semi-rural district on the edge of London, and died on 26 June 1939 in Deauville, France. He was one of the most energetic and consequential literary figures of the transition from late Victorian culture to modernism: a novelist, poet, memoirist, critic, editor, propagandist, literary theorist, and tireless ad…
“The writer's business is to make the reader see what he sees.”
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…
“By such hints the imagination, being stimulated, and left to act on its own account, was roused to greater energy than by the display of forms in their completeness.”
About 351 km separate Merton, Surrey, 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.
Ford Madox Hueffer: merton, ford madox brown, the brown owl, the questions at the well, the fifth queen trilogy, the good soldier, joseph conrad, the english review. 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.
Ford Madox Hueffer: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.
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