Meng Haoran, one of the defining poets of China’s High Tang age, was born around 689 or 690 and died in 740. His life unfolded during the long and brilliant reign of Emperor Xuanzong, an era remembered for imperial confidence, commercial vitality, religious pluralism, and an extraordinary flowering of poetry. Yet Meng’s achievement is distinctive precisely because he did not chiefly write about the glitter of the cap…
Compare Poets
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.
Poet A
Meng Haoran
Poet B
Witter Bynner
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 69%
Blended 69%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“The head of a man and the heart of a child working together as in the Chinese have made possible with one race and may make possible with any race, even in the thick of the most intricate culture, the continuance of the purest poetry.”
In time
Meng Haoran
Witter Bynner
690
1968
Their lives did not overlap.
1141 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 11,908 km separate Xiangyang, Hubei, China from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
From the biographies
landscape
social
friends
Meng Haoran: high tang, emperor xuanzong, xiangyang, han river, wang wei, meng the mountain recluse, spring dawn, visiting an old friend's farmstead. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
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.
The world around them
Meng Haoran
Witter Bynner
Emotional landscapes
Meng Haoran: Peace, Wonder, Sensuality. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.