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.
Robert Frost
William Stanley Braithwaite
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Robert Lee Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California, at a distance both geographical and imaginative from the New England landscape with which his name would become permanently associated. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a Harvard-educated teacher turned journalist and political aspirant, a man of forceful opinions, Southern sympathies, and unstable prospects. His mother, Isabelle Mood…
“The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”
William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite entered the world on December 6, 1878, in Boston, Massachusetts, a city pulsing with literary ambition and the lingering echoes of abolitionist fervor. He departed it on June 8, 1962, at his home on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, New York, after a brief illness, at the age of eighty-three. In the eighty-three years between those dates, Braithwaite forged a remarkable life as poet, cr…
“What makes an American poetry is a question that has never been and can never be solved by criticism.”
About 4,332 km separate San Francisco, California, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Boston and Massachusetts.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Frost: san francisco, new england, william prescott frost, isabelle moodie frost, my butterfly: an elegy, the independent, elizabeth white, mending wall. William Stanley Braithwaite: boston, massachusetts, harlem, new york, emma kelly, lyrics of life and love, the house of falling leaves, anthology of magazine verse, spingarn medal, atlanta university.
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.
Robert Frost: Wonder, Longing, Peace. William Stanley Braithwaite: Joy, Wonder, Peace.
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