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.
On March 12, 1863, in the coastal city of Pescara in the Abruzzi region of Italy, a child was born who would come to embody the restless, turbulent spirit of his age like no other writer of his generation. Baptized Gaetano, he would forever be known by the name his family gave him in childhood—Gabriele—a name that seemed to foreshadow the angelic, almost otherworldly presence he would project throughout his life. Gab…
“Memento audere semper.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Dramatic Poets, Italian Renaissance Poets, Political Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Genevieve Taggard was born on November 28, 1894, in the small farming community of Waitsburg, Washington, a place of dust-choked fields and modest wooden houses that would later stand in stark contrast to the lush paradise of her childhood memories. She died on November 8, 1948, in a New York City hospital, just shy of her fifty-fourth birthday, her body worn down by chronic hypertension that had increasingly confine…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Women Poets
They overlapped for 45 years (1894–1938).
When Genevieve Taggard was born, Gabriele D'Annunzio was about 31.
Genevieve Taggard was about 44 when Gabriele D'Annunzio died.
About 9,089 km separate
Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy from
Waitsburg, Washington, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Gabriele D'Annunzio:
pescara, abruzzi, maria hardouin di gallese, eleonora duse, il piacere, canto novo, laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi, alcyone.
Genevieve Taggard:
waitsburg, washington, honolulu, hawaii, robert l. wolf, marcia liles, for eager lovers, hawaiian hilltop, travelling standing still, the life and mind of emily dickinson.
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.