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.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Madison Julius Cawein
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“Myself a young disciple.”
Madison Julius Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 23 March 1865, at the unsettled close of the Civil War, and died there on 8 December 1914, not yet fifty years old. During his lifetime he was among the best-known American poets of his generation, a writer praised by influential editors, admired in Britain as well as the United States, and affectionately called the “Keats of Kentucky.” After his death, howev…
About 6,498 km separate Ealing, London, England from Louisville, Kentucky, 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.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston. Madison Julius Cawein: louisville, keats of kentucky, blooms of the berry, kentucky poems, edmund clarence stedman, gertrude foster mckelvey, myth and romance, intimations of the beautiful.
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.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Madison Julius Cawein: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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