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.
Arthur Rimbaud
Leigh Hunt
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, and died on 10 November 1891 in Marseille. Few writers have produced so small a body of work and so immense a legend. Rimbaud wrote nearly all the poetry for which he is remembered between his mid-teens and about twenty, then turned away from literature with an apparent decisiveness that has fascinat…
“I have decided to give you an hour of new literature.”
James Henry Leigh Hunt, known throughout his literary life as Leigh Hunt, was born on 19 October 1784 at Southgate, then a village north of London, and died at Putney on 28 August 1859. He was a poet, essayist, journalist, editor, critic, translator, dramatist, and indefatigable friend to writers whose fame would eventually eclipse his own. To describe him merely as a minor Romantic poet is to miss the range of his a…
“The books I like to have about me most are Spenser, Chaucer, the minor poems of Milton, the Arabian Nights, Theocritus, Ariosto, and such old good-natured speculations as Plutarch’s Morals.”
About 398 km separate Charleville, Ardennes, France from Southgate, London, England. 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.
Arthur Rimbaud: charleville, marseille, franco-prussian war, paul verlaine, madame rimbaud, les étrennes des orphelins, le dormeur du val, le bateau ivre. Leigh Hunt: southgate, putney, john keats, percy bysshe shelley, the examiner, the feast of the poets, the story of rimini, cockney school of poetry.
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.
Arthur Rimbaud: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. Leigh Hunt: Tenderness, Joy, Wonder.
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