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.
Edward Lear
William Butler Yeats
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edward Lear was born on 12 May 1812 at Holloway, then a semi-rural northern suburb of London, and died at San Remo, Italy, on 29 January 1888. He is now cherished as one of the great makers of English literary nonsense: the author of “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “The Jumblies,” “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and hundreds of limericks populated by improbable old persons, birds, cats, Quangle Wangles, and creatures wh…
“Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils.”
William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at Sandymount, County Dublin, and died on 28 January 1939 at Menton, France. During the seventy-three years between those dates, he became not merely Ireland’s most internationally celebrated modern poet but one of the major writers in English. Poet, dramatist, essayist, editor, cultural organizer, senator, and tireless architect of literary institutions, Yeats made a car…
“We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith.”
About 462 km separate Holloway, London, England from Dublin, Ireland. 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.
Edward Lear: san remo, the owl and the pussycat, the jumblies, the dong with a luminous nose, nonsense poetry, chichester fortescue, franklin lushington, illustrations of the family of psittacidae. William Butler Yeats: sandymount, county dublin, menton, maud gonne, the wanderings of oisin, the second coming, sailing to byzantium, abbey theatre.
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.
Edward Lear: Wonder, Joy, Peace. William Butler Yeats: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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