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…
“It appeals to the imagination from the start: those colours, green and yellow, create an atmosphere. Then India, everyone has his own idea of India. Don't tell the public too much. Strike chords.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets
Anne Knish, credited in some accounts with the dates 1916–1917, was not a historical poet in the ordinary biographical sense. She had no childhood, family, home town, education, intimate correspondence, or grave. Rather, she was a deliberately invented literary identity, one of the central masks in the Spectra hoax, a remarkable episode in American poetry during the first years of modernism. The name “Anne Knish” bel…
About 5,405 km separate
Leeds, Yorkshire, England from
New York City, New York, 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.
Anne Knish:
spectra hoax, arthur davison ficke, witter bynner, davenport, iowa, hudson, new york, spectrism, opus 76, free verse.
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.
