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.
C. P. Cavafy
Witter Bynner
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Constantine Peter Cavafy, universally known as C. P. Cavafy, was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, on 29 April 1863, and died there on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday. The coincidence has naturally encouraged a Cavafian reading of his life: a date returning with a measured inevitability, an ending that seems to complete a private design. Yet Cavafy’s achievement was anything but neat or pr…
“I am a poet of old age.”
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 outstanding English poets have been acutely concerned with the happiness of their fellow men and have given themselves warmly to public causes in which they believed.”
About 8,838 km separate Alexandria, Egypt from Brooklyn, New York, USA. 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.
C. P. Cavafy: alexandria, greek diaspora, anglo-egyptian war, peter john cavafy, haricleia georgaki cavafy, the god abandons antony, waiting for the barbarians, che fece... il gran rifiuto. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
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.
C. P. Cavafy: Despair, Sorrow, Longing. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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