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
James Elroy Flecker
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…
“But with Victor Hugo I do not say, ‘Art for Art’, but ‘Art for humanity’.”
The story of James Elroy Flecker is one of brilliant promise cut tragically short, of a poet who sought to recapture the lush exoticism and sensuous beauty of the Romantics in an age growing increasingly modernist and austere. Born Herman Elroy Flecker on November 5, 1884, in Lewisham, London, he would live only thirty years before tuberculosis claimed him, yet in that brief span he created a body of work that contin…
“It is not the poet's business to save man's soul, but to make it worth saving.”
About 20 km separate Ealing, London, England from Deptford, London, England. Both have ground in London.
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. James Elroy Flecker: lewisham, tuberculosis, the bridge of fire, thirty-six poems, the golden journey to samarkand, hassan, hellé skiadaressi, parnassian.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. James Elroy Flecker: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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