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.
Joyce Kilmer
Aubrey Thomas de Vere
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Alfred Joyce Kilmer was born on 6 December 1886 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, into a household in which intellectual seriousness and artistic feeling were not opposites but companion forces. His father, Frederick Barnett Kilmer, was a physician, analytical chemist, and later a leading scientific figure at Johnson & Johnson; his work helped establish standards for pharmaceutical and consumer-health products in an era…
“The Catholic Church is the only thing that makes life worth living.”
Aubrey Thomas de Vere was born on 10 January 1814 at Curragh Chase, the family estate near Adare in County Limerick, Ireland, and died there on 20 January 1902, ten days after his eighty-eighth birthday. He belonged to a world of inherited land, cultivated learning, Protestant Ascendancy privilege, and literary ambition, yet much of his life was spent interrogating the moral assumptions of that world. In the course o…
About 5,006 km separate New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA from Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland. 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.
Joyce Kilmer: new brunswick, new jersey, aline murray, trees, roman catholicism, poetry society of america, columbia university, summer of love. Aubrey Thomas de Vere: curragh chase, county limerick, protestant ascendancy, william wordsworth, john henry newman, the waldenses, the search after proserpine, great famine.
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.
Joyce Kilmer: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. Aubrey Thomas de Vere: Spirituality, Peace, Sorrow.
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