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.
James Joyce
Conrad Aiken
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…
“Otherwise, write to Rodker and ask him to let you have the other copies.”
The story of Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) reads like something from a Gothic novel, yet it is the true foundation upon which one of twentieth-century America's most psychologically complex poets built his life and work. Born into comfortable circumstances in Savannah, Georgia, Aiken seemed destined for the privileged life his family background suggested. His father, William Ford Aiken, had s…
“I argued that each of us was trying to urge poetry in a direction favorable to himself, and that dispassionate judgment was a chimera.”
About 6,233 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Savannah, Georgia, 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.
James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste. Conrad Aiken: savannah, georgia, william ford aiken, anna potter aiken, ushant, the charnel rose, the jig of forslin, the house of dust, senlin: a biography.
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.
James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Conrad Aiken: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness.
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