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.
Edward FitzGerald
George Sterling
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edward FitzGerald was born Edward Purcell on 31 March 1809 at Bredfield House, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, and died on 14 June 1883 at Merton, Norfolk. He occupies an unusual position in English literary history. He wrote original prose, verse, letters, dialogues, and adaptations, translated from Spanish, Greek, and Persian, and moved in circles that included Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Tho…
“I suppose I shall be known by the Rubáiyát, and I don't care how.”
George Sterling was born on 1 December 1869 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, and died on 17 November 1926 in San Francisco, California. During his lifetime he was celebrated, often extravagantly, as the foremost poet of the American Pacific Coast: a writer of redwood groves, desert immensities, sea fog, cosmic fire, erotic dream, and supernatural terror. His reputation later suffered a dramatic eclipse. The rich…
About 5,511 km separate Bredfield, Suffolk, England from Sag Harbor, New York, USA. 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.
Edward FitzGerald: bredfield house, the rubáiyát of omar khayyám, alfred tennyson, william makepeace thackeray, trinity college cambridge, george crabbe, edward byles cowell, euphranor. George Sterling: sag harbor, san francisco, the testimony of the suns, a wine of wizardry, ambrose bierce, jack london, bohemian club, california poet.
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.
Edward FitzGerald: Peace, Joy, Tenderness. George Sterling: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness.
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