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.
John Masefield
W. H. Davies
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Edward Masefield was born on 1 June 1878 in Ledbury, Herefordshire, a market town on the borderlands of England and Wales, and died on 12 May 1967 at Abingdon, then in Berkshire. During his long life he became one of Britain’s most recognizable poets: a writer of sailors, fields, foxhunts, village sinners, mythic heroes, children’s dreams, national ceremonies, and private grief. He was also a novelist, playwrigh…
“Man is immortal till his work is done.”
William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…
“Cats — by day the most docile of God's creatures, every one of them in the night enlisting under the devil's banner — took the place by storm after the human voice had ceased.”
About 64 km separate Ledbury, Herefordshire, England from Newport, Wales. 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.
John Masefield: ledbury, herefordshire, hms conway, salt-water ballads, sea fever, the everlasting mercy, constance de la cherois crommelin, the tragedy of pompey the great. W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp.
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.
John Masefield: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing.
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