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.
Paul Éluard
Joaquin Miller
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel on 14 December 1895 in Saint-Denis, near Paris, became one of the defining French poets of the twentieth century. His career crossed some of the century’s most turbulent landscapes: the First World War, the invention of Dada and Surrealism, the rise of fascism, the German occupation of France, the liberation, and the ideological divisions of the Cold War. In each period, Él…
“Bread is more useful than poetry.”
Joaquin Miller, born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller on September 8, 1837, and dead on February 17, 1913, lived a life that seemed designed to invite legend. He was a poet, journalist, lawyer, teacher, dramatist, lecturer, rancher, and relentless self-inventor. To admirers in the nineteenth century, he was the “Poet of the Sierras,” a bard who had given the American West its own grand, romantic voice. To skeptics, he was an…
“Man reads too much and reasons too little. Great artists are not great readers but great observers.”
About 6,666 km separate Saint-Denis, Île-de-France, France from Indiana, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Paul Éluard: saint-denis, gala, surrealism, dada, first world war, tuberculosis, capitale de la douleur, la vie immédiate. Joaquin Miller: poet of the sierras, oregon territory, life amongst the modocs, kit carson's ride, songs of the sierras, songs of the sun-lands, theresa dyer, abigail leland.
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.
Paul Éluard: Despair, Sorrow, Fear. Joaquin Miller: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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