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.
Arthur Davison Ficke
Trumbull Stickney
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Arthur Davison Ficke was born in Davenport, Iowa, on 10 November 1883, at a moment when the United States was rapidly becoming both an industrial power and a more self-conscious literary nation. He died on 30 November 1945, at the age of sixty-two, leaving a body of poetry that can seem difficult to classify neatly. He was at once a disciplined maker of sonnets, a cosmopolitan traveler, a student of Asian cultures, a…
“The quietest moments often contain the loudest truths.”
Joseph Trumbull Stickney, known almost always as Trumbull Stickney, was born on 20 June 1874 in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Boston on 11 October 1904. His brief life, ending when he was only thirty, has encouraged the familiar image of the doomed young poet whose promise exceeds his surviving achievement. That image is not wholly wrong, but it is too simple. Stickney was not merely a promising lyricist interrupt…
“You refer to the last thing excavated on classic soil, my own torso. It proves not to be an antique at all, but a work of a New England sculptor who was wrecked in a dory off the Peloponnesian Coast.”
About 7,261 km separate Davenport, Iowa, USA from Geneva, Switzerland. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Arthur Davison Ficke: davenport, iowa, spectra hoax, witter bynner, anne knish, harvard university, the breaking of bonds, sonnets of a portrait-painter. Trumbull Stickney: geneva, boston, harvard college, william vaughn moody, george santayana, dramatic lyrics, greek tragedy, american school of classical studies.
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.
Arthur Davison Ficke: Fear, Sorrow, Wonder. Trumbull Stickney: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.
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