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.
Laurence Binyon
Ezra Pound
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“Personality, in the Chinese view of art, counts enormously.”
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on 30 October 1885 in Hailey, in the Idaho Territory of the United States, and died on 1 November 1972 in Venice, Italy. Few writers altered the course of twentieth-century poetry as decisively as he did, and few have left behind a legacy so divided between artistic admiration and moral revulsion. Pound was a poet, editor, translator, critic, impresario, polemicist, and tireless orga…
“Go in fear of abstractions.”
About 7,377 km separate Lancaster, England from Hailey, Idaho, 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.
Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon. Ezra Pound: hailey, venice, imagism, vorticism, t.s. eliot, james joyce, h.d., the cantos.
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.
Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace. Ezra Pound: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.