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.
George William Russell
Emma Lazarus
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
George William Russell, who wrote and painted under the name Æ, was born on 10 April 1867 in Lurgan, County Armagh, and died on 17 July 1935 in Bournemouth, England. He belongs among the most remarkable figures of the Irish Revival, though he has often occupied a position just outside its popular canon. William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, George Moore, Padraic Colum, and later Patr…
“The world is a spiritual world, and we are spiritual beings.”
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on 22 July 1849 and died there on 19 November 1887, only thirty-eight years later. Her name is now inseparable from “The New Colossus,” the sonnet whose plea for the world’s “tired,” “poor,” and “huddled masses” has become the verbal companion to the Statue of Liberty. Yet the familiarity of those lines has often obscured the larger achievement of the woman who wrote them. Lazar…
“I cannot resist the impulse of expressing to you my extreme disappointment at finding you have so far modified the enthusiastic estimate you held of my literary labors as to refuse me a place in the large and miscellaneous collection of poems you have just edited. I find myself treated with absolute contempt in the very quarter where I had been encouraged to build my fondest hopes.”
About 5,084 km separate Lurgan, County Armagh, Ireland from New York City, New York, 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.
George William Russell: lurgan, county armagh, william butler yeats, theosophical society, homeward: songs by the way, the earth breath, the divine vision, violet north. Emma Lazarus: new york city, the new colossus, moses lazarus, esther nathan, admetus and other poems, alide: an episode of goethe’s life, the spagnoletto, william cullen bryant.
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.
George William Russell: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. Emma Lazarus: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder.
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