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.
Joanna Baillie
Yosa Buson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Joanna Baillie was born on 11 September 1762 at the manse of Bothwell, near Hamilton in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and died on 23 February 1851 at Hampstead, then a village on the northern edge of London. During her exceptionally long life, she became one of the most admired British writers of the Romantic period: a poet of acute observation, an ambitious theorist of the emotions, a dramatist who sought to renew tragedy…
“This book then, does not hold out the allurement of novelty.”
Yosa Buson, born in 1716 and dead on 17 January 1784, occupies a singular place in Japanese culture: he was at once one of the supreme masters of haiku, a major painter of the Edo period, an editor and teacher, a student of literary history, and a deliberate maker of artistic personae. Along with Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa, he is regularly named among the three greatest poets of the classical haiku tradition. Su…
“What you want to acquire, you should dare to acquire by any means. What you want to see, even though it is with difficulty, you should see. You should not let it pass, thinking there will be another chance.”
About 9,246 km separate Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland from Kema, Settsu Province, Japan. 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.
Joanna Baillie: bothwell, lanarkshire, james baillie, dorothea hunter baillie, william hunter, a series of plays, de monfort, the witchcraft. Yosa Buson: settsu province, kema, tokugawa shogunate, matsuo bashō, kobayashi issa, hayano hajin, bunjin, nanga.
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.
Joanna Baillie: Tenderness, Joy, Longing. Yosa Buson: Peace, Joy, Tenderness.
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