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
Edgar Allan Poe
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…
“I am a great lover of nonsense.”
Edgar Allan Poe stands as one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in American literature, a writer whose troubled life and haunting works have captivated readers for nearly two centuries. Born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, he would live only forty years before his mysterious death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland. Yet in that brief span, he revolutionized multiple litera…
“In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts.”
About 5,264 km separate Holloway, London, England from Boston, Massachusetts, 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.
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. Edgar Allan Poe: boston, richmond, baltimore, virginia clemm, john allan, tamerlane and other poems, the raven, the fall of the house of usher.
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. Edgar Allan Poe: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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