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.
Charlotte Smith
Sir Aubrey 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.
Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London on 4 May 1749 and died at Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey, on 28 October 1806. During her lifetime she was known not only as a poet but as one of the most productive and commercially important writers in Britain. She published poetry, novels, children’s books, translations, and educational works while sustaining a large family and enduring a marriage, a debt crisis,…
“The public has been so indulgent to the former editions of these poems.”
Sir Aubrey de Vere, born Aubrey Hunt on 28 August 1788 and dead on 5 July 1846, was an Irish poet, dramatist, landowner, magistrate, and baronet whose life joined literary aspiration to the duties and assumptions of the Anglo-Irish governing class. He is now frequently encountered as the father of the better-known poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere, and that relationship has sometimes obscured the elder man’s own achievement…
“The poet's function is not to describe nature, but to interpret it.”
About 591 km separate Stoke next Guildford, Surrey, England 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.
Charlotte Smith: london, elegiac sonnets, the old manor house, the emigrants, nicholas turner, benjamin smith, french revolution, georgian england. Sir Aubrey de Vere: curragh chase, county limerick, aubrey thomas de vere, william wordsworth, lord byron, mary spring rice, thomas spring rice, anglo-irish governing class.
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.
Charlotte Smith: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Sir Aubrey de Vere: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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