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
Edward Thomas
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.”
Edward Thomas was born Philip Edward Thomas on 3 March 1878 at Lambeth in south London, and died on 9 April 1917 near Arras in France, aged thirty-nine. His name now evokes a particular kind of English poetry: quiet but unsettled, exact in its descriptions of paths, trains, weather, birds, woods, and country speech, yet charged with questions of loss, belonging, choice, and mortality. His poetic career lasted scarcel…
“The road is an old friend to me.”
About 86 km separate Canterbury, Kent, England from Lambeth, London, 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. Edward Thomas: lambeth, first world war, robert frost, adlestrop, the happy-go-lucky morgans, six poems, poems, oxford.
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.
Walter de la Mare: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness. Edward Thomas: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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