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.
William Johnson Cory
Laurence Binyon
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Johnson Cory, born William Johnson on 9 January 1823 and dead on 11 June 1892, occupies an unusual but durable place in English literary history. He was never a major public poet in the Victorian manner of Tennyson or Browning; he published relatively little, lived much of his life within the secluded world of elite education, and became known to many readers through a small collection rather than a grand car…
“Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.”
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“The true artist, working when the mood was on him, was brought into direct relation with the creative power indwelling in the world.”
About 355 km separate Great Torrington, Devon, England from Lancaster, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
William Johnson Cory: great torrington, eton college, king's college cambridge, ionica, mimnermus in church, heraclitus, the two captains, a lesson. Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon.
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.
William Johnson Cory: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.
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