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…
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets
William H. A. Moore, born about 1885 and deceased in 1960, belongs to that important but still insufficiently recovered generation of African American poets whose careers connected the literary culture of the late nineteenth century with the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance and its related movements in Chicago, Washington, and other urban centers. His surviving reputation rests on a small body of lyric poetry, sca…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
They overlapped for 56 years (1885–1940).
When William H. A. Moore was born, J. Milton Hayes was about 1.
William H. A. Moore was about 55 when J. Milton Hayes died.
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.
William H. A. Moore:
new york city, dusk songs, the crisis, james weldon johnson, harlem renaissance, city college of new york, columbia university, 1919 race riot.
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.