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
Bret Harte
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…
“It was Whistler who proved that art was synonymous with hard work.”
Francis Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, and dead on 5 May 1902 in Camberley, Surrey, England, was the first American writer to make the Gold Rush West seem not merely picturesque or exotic but worthy of a literature of its own. Before Harte, the Pacific frontier had often appeared in Eastern writing as a distant field of adventure, speculation, and caricature. Harte helped g…
“I don’t mind saying plainly, that it was the most diabolically hideous and stupidly monotonous performance I ever heard.”
About 11,292 km separate Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan from Albany, New York, USA. 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. Bret Harte: albany, new york, camberley, surrey, gold rush, overland monthly, the luck of roaring camp, the outcasts of poker flat, anna griswold, samuel clemens.
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. Bret Harte: Sorrow, Longing, Irony.
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