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.
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 forty degrees of heat here; at home we sweat litres of water every day.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
In the pantheon of American letters, Thomas Bailey Aldrich occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully celebrated, he stands as a bridge figure between the rough-hewn democracy of antebellum American literature and the refined aestheticism that would characterize the Gilded Age. Born into a nation still finding its literary voice and dying in an America confidently asserting its cultural sophistication, A…
“After a man passes his fiftieth milestone he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakefulness is no credit to him.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
They overlapped for 38 years (1854–1891).
When Arthur Rimbaud was born, Thomas Bailey Aldrich was about 18.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was about 55 when Arthur Rimbaud died.
About 5,584 km separate
Charleville, Ardennes, France from
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Arthur Rimbaud:
charleville, marseille, franco-prussian war, paul verlaine, madame rimbaud, les étrennes des orphelins, le dormeur du val, le bateau ivre.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich:
portsmouth, new hampshire, new orleans, lilian woodman, the bells: a collection of chimes, the ballad of babie bell, shiloh: a requiem, the story of a bad boy, james russell lowell.
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.
