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.
Alan Seeger
Wilfred Owen
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Alan Seeger was born in New York City on 22 June 1888, into an American family whose comfort, education, and international connections gave him unusual freedom while also placing before him the question of what a privileged young man ought to do with his life. He died on 4 July 1916, age twenty-eight, in the Battle of the Somme while serving in the French Foreign Legion. In the years between those dates he became, in…
“I have always been a fatalist.”
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, on the borderland between England and Wales. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw Owen; his siblings were Mary, Harold, and Colin. The family’s circumstances were respectable but precarious. Thomas had once been employed as a railway stationmaster, and Susan came from a family with str…
“For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes, where at any moment a shell might put us out.”
About 5,336 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Oswestry, Shropshire, England. Both have ground in Hauts-de-France.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Alan Seeger: new york city, battle of the somme, french foreign legion, i have a rendezvous with death, the torture of cuauhtemoc, charles seeger sr., elsie simmons adams seeger, pete seeger. Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled.
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.
Alan Seeger: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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