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.
Walter de la Mare
Walter Savage Landor
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Walter John de la Mare was born on 25 April 1873 at Charlton, then in Kent and now part of southeast London, into a family whose circumstances were modest but whose cultural inheritance was unusually varied. His father, James Edward de la Mare, worked as an official at the Bank of England; his mother, Lucy Sophia Browning, came from a family with Scottish connections. The surname preserved a French Huguenot ancestry,…
“Only the rarest kind of best is good enough for the young.”
Walter Savage Landor was born on 30 January 1775 at Ipsley Court, near Warwick, England, into circumstances of comfort, cultivation, and inherited expectation. His father, Walter Landor, was a physician of substantial means and social standing; his mother, Elizabeth Savage, came from a family whose name and property gave her son the middle name he would make inseparable from his literary identity. Landor’s life, whic…
“No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great.”
About 215 km separate Canterbury, Kent, England from Warwick, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Walter de la Mare: charlton, st paul's cathedral choir school, songs of childhood, the listeners, the three mulla-mulgars, peacock pie, elfrida ingpen, henry newbolt. Walter Savage Landor: ipsley court, warwick, florence, gebir, julia thuillier, imaginary conversations, trinity college, oxford.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Walter de la Mare: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness. Walter Savage Landor: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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