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.
Strickland Gillilan
Sam Walter Foss
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Strickland Gillilan was born on 21 September 1869 in Jackson County, Ohio, a region whose rural rhythms, small-town sociability, and vigorous political culture supplied much of the material from which he would make a career. He died on 25 April 1954 in Baltimore, Maryland, after a long life spent as a journalist, lecturer, humorist, versifier, and public entertainer. In the literary histories that privilege modernism…
“Successfully entertaining talks are my merchandise.”
Sam Walter Foss was born on 19 June 1858 in Candia, New Hampshire, a small rural community whose fields, roads, churches, village shops, and close social networks supplied the emotional landscape of much of his later poetry. He died on 26 February 1911 in Somerville, Massachusetts, at the age of fifty-two. Between those dates he became one of the best-known popular poets in the United States, though not one of its mo…
About 1,051 km separate Jackson County, Ohio, USA from Candia, New Hampshire, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Strickland Gillilan: jackson county, baltimore, the reading mother, including finnigin, sunshine and awkwardness, humorist, newspaper-minded poet, public entertainer. Sam Walter Foss: candia, new hampshire, somerville, massachusetts, back country poems, the house by the side of the road, brown university, phillips exeter academy, gilded age, progressive era.
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.
Strickland Gillilan: Joy, Wonder, Irony. Sam Walter Foss: Tenderness, Peace, Joy.
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