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.
John Burroughs
Witter Bynner
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
On a spring morning in the Catskill Mountains, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sits beneath a gnarled apple tree, notebook in hand, watching a hermit thrush build its nest. This is John Burroughs in his element—not in a library or lecture hall, but in the cathedral of nature itself. For more than six decades, Burroughs served as America's interpreter of the natural world, transforming simple observations of…
“How beautiful a day can be when one is touched by nature.”
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“I have hoped rather to accent in these T'ang masterpieces the human and universal qualities by which they have endured.”
About 186 km separate Roxbury, New York, USA from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Both have ground in New York.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
John Burroughs: catskill mountains, roxbury, new york, walt whitman, ralph waldo emerson, wake-robin, slabsides, riverby, theodore roosevelt. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
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.
John Burroughs: Peace, Spirituality, Joy. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
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