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.
Samuel Rogers was born on 30 July 1763 at Newington Green, then a village on the northern edge of London and now part of the capital’s urban fabric. He died on 18 December 1855, aged ninety-two, having outlived nearly every major writer of the generation with which he was associated. His long life stretched from the late age of Samuel Johnson to the early reign of Queen Victoria; he knew the world before the French R…
“The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who reads too.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Romantic Poets
On a sweltering August evening in 1897, in a ramshackle laboratory in Secunderabad, India, a British army surgeon made a discovery that would save millions of lives. After dissecting his twentieth mosquito of the day, Ronald Ross finally observed what he had been seeking for years: the malarial parasite nestled within the insect's gut. That night, exhausted but exultant, he composed a poem celebrating his breakthroug…
“The mosquito is the most dangerous animal in the world.”
About 6,769 km separate
Deptford, London, England from
Almora, Uttarakhand, India.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Samuel Rogers:
newington green, the pleasures of memory, an ode to superstition, thomas gray, william collins, oliver goldsmith, victorian novel, dissenting community.
Ronald Ross:
secunderabad, nobel prize, malaria transmission, in exile, ronald campbell, rosa bessie bloxam, the child of ocean, patrick manson.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
