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.
Christina Rossetti
Ivan Krylov
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
To read Christina Rossetti is to enter a world of exquisite tension, a realm where the sacred and the sensual wage a quiet but ferocious war. She is the poet of renunciation who wrote some of the most sensuous verse in the English language, the devout Anglo-Catholic who filled her pages with goblin fruits that drip with irresistible juice, and the reclusive Victorian spinster whose inner life was a tumultuous landsca…
“Still justice must take precedence of generosity.”
Ivan Andreyevich Krylov, born on 13 February 1769 and dead on 21 November 1844, occupies a singular place in Russian literature: he is at once a classic author taught to children, a master satirist quoted by politicians and journalists, and a poet whose compact animal tales preserve an unusually sharp view of human weakness. To call him merely “the Russian Aesop,” as generations of readers have done, is useful but in…
“Friendship, then, should rest on the strongest foundation: respect, strengthened by knowledge of another's worth, a foundation that cannot be shaken.”
About 2,501 km separate 38 Charlotte Street, London, England from Moscow, Russia. 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.
Christina Rossetti: pre-raphaelite brotherhood, goblin market, the girlhood of mary virgin, dante gabriel rossetti, james collinson, charles bagot cayley, anglo-catholic, sing-song: a nursery rhyme book. Ivan Krylov: moscow, tver, catherine ii, pugachev rebellion, ivan krylov's fables, the coffeehouse, the fashion shop, a lesson to daughters.
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.
Christina Rossetti: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Ivan Krylov: Sorrow, Irony, Longing.
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