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.
Sadakichi Hartmann
Hart Crane
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“To transform history into art is surely not a sin.”
Hart Crane’s life was a blaze of incandescent vision cut short by the very torments that fueled his art. Born Harold Hart Crane on July 21, 1899, in the quiet village of Garrettsville, Ohio, he arrived into a world already humming with the industrial promise that would later become the spine of his poetry. His father, Clarence A. Crane, was a shrewd and ambitious candy manufacturer who would one day invent the Life S…
“One can live happily on very little, I have found, if the mind and spirit have some definite objective in view.”
About 11,193 km separate Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan from Garrettsville, Ohio, United States. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Sadakichi Hartmann: dejima, nagasaki harbor, walt whitman, whitman society, christ: a dramatic poem, buddha, confucius, mohammed. Hart Crane: garrettsville, cleveland, white buildings, the bridge, emil opffer, waldo frank, guggenheim fellowship, brooklyn bridge.
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.
Sadakichi Hartmann: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing. Hart Crane: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality.
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