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.
Joseph Milton Hayes, known to the public as J. Milton Hayes, was born in Bristol on 13 January 1884 and died on 6 February 1940. During his lifetime he became one of the best-known writers of recitation verse in Britain, a poet whose work was heard as often as it was read. His celebrity rested especially on “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God,” a narrative poem whose opening line, “There’s a one-eyed yellow idol…
“I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets
Francis James Child, born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 February 1825 and dead in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 11 September 1896, became one of the most consequential preservers of traditional verse in the English-speaking world. He was not a collector in the modern fieldworker’s sense: he did not chiefly travel from village to village with a notebook, recording singers’ performances and melodies as later folklorist…
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Victorian Poets
They overlapped for 13 years (1884–1896).
When J. Milton Hayes was born, Francis James Child was about 59.
J. Milton Hayes was about 12 when Francis James Child died.
About 5,099 km separate
Leeds, Yorkshire, England from
Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
J. Milton Hayes:
bristol, the green eye of the little yellow god, khatmandu, the punch and judy man, edwardian period, music halls, variety theatres, public recitations.
Francis James Child:
boston, harvard college, child's ballads, the twa sisters, lord randal, tam lin, sir patrick spens, barbara allen.
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.
