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.
Ebenezer Jones was born in Islington, then a northern suburb of London, on 20 January 1820, and died in London on 14 September 1860, only forty years old. During his lifetime he was almost wholly unknown as a poet, and for decades after his death his name survived chiefly as a curiosity in bibliographies and among a small number of readers with a taste for neglected Victorian oddities. Yet his reputation gradually al…
Emanuel Morgan occupies one of the most unusual positions in American literary history: he was a poet who never existed in the ordinary biographical sense, yet whose poems, reputation, controversies, and afterlife have proved remarkably real. The dates commonly attached to him, 1916–1917, refer not to the span of a human life but to the brief public career of a deliberately invented authorial persona. “Emanuel Morgan…
About 5,571 km separate
Islington, London, England from
New York City, New York, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Ebenezer Jones:
islington, studies of sensation and event, victorian poetry, percy bysshe shelley, john keats, robert browning, chartism, commercial realities.
Emanuel Morgan:
spectrism, witter bynner, arthur davison ficke, santa fe, harvard university, tao te ching, mock avant-garde, poetry society of america.
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.