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
E. Nesbit
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…
“Is any book ever absolutely accurate?”
Edith Nesbit, who published most often as E. Nesbit, was born on 15 August 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, then part of Surrey and now within south London. She died on 4 May 1924 at New Romney, Kent. In the years between those dates she became one of the most inventive writers for children in English, an accomplished poet, a novelist of adult life, a writer of ghost stories and social comedy, a social…
“Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children.”
About 18 km separate 38 Charlotte Street, London, England from Kennington, Surrey, England. Both have ground in England.
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. E. Nesbit: kennington, new romney, hubert bland, the railway children, five children and it, the story of the treasure seekers, fabian society, songs of love and empire.
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. E. Nesbit: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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