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.
Edmund Waller
William Sidney Walker
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edmund Waller was born on 3 March 1606 at Coleshill, near Amersham in Buckinghamshire, and died on 21 October 1687 at Beaconsfield. His long life carried him through the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the Restoration of Charles II, and the opening years of James II’s rule. Few English poets lived so visibly amid such violent political reversals, and fewer still man…
“Poets, sir, succeed better in fiction than in truth.”
William Sidney Walker was born on 4 December 1795 at Pembroke, in the old maritime county of Pembrokeshire in South Wales, and died in London on 15 October 1846. He occupies an unusual place in nineteenth-century English literary history: he was at once a precocious poet, a brilliant classical scholar, an acute if sometimes severe critic, and one of the earliest serious investigators of Shakespeare’s metre and langua…
About 295 km separate Coleshill, Buckinghamshire, England from Pembroke, Wales. Both have ground in England and St James's and London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Edmund Waller: coleshill, beaconsfield, james i, charles i, civil wars, commonwealth, restoration, lady dorothy sidney. William Sidney Walker: pembroke, south wales, gustavus vasa, winthrop mackworth praed, john moultrie, trinity college cambridge, craven scholarship, porson prize.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Edmund Waller: Longing, Tenderness, Peace. William Sidney Walker: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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