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.
Richard Le Gallienne
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Richard Le Gallienne, born Richard Thomas Gallienne in Liverpool on 20 January 1866 and dead at Menton, France, on 15 September 1947, lived long enough to become both a participant in and a chronicler of several literary ages. He began as an ambitious young poet of the late Victorian aesthetic movement, came to public notice amid the bright notoriety of the 1890s, crossed the Atlantic to remake himself for an America…
“A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.”
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“Truly, I think that a little ‘Art for Art’ has already done a great deal of good in England, and that a little more is needed, and would be equally beneficial.”
About 274 km separate Liverpool, England from Ealing, 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.
Richard Le Gallienne: liverpool, menton, oscar wilde, the yellow book, aesthetic movement, my ladies’ sonnets, the book-bills of narcissus, the quest of the golden girl. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston.
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.
Richard Le Gallienne: Despair, Sorrow, Longing. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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