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
Robert Williams Buchanan
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…
“The poet is truly a thief of fire.”
On a warm August morning in 1841, in the quiet Staffordshire village of Caverswall, Robert Williams Buchanan was born on August 18. He entered a world already marked by ideological fervor and social upheaval, for his father, Robert Buchanan senior, was no ordinary parent but a passionate advocate of Robert Owen's socialist schemes, traveling the country as an itinerant lecturer preaching cooperation and radical socia…
“Set me down as a fool if you like, but never doubt the friendship which makes me subscribe myself, yours always.”
About 589 km separate Charleville, Ardennes, France from Caverswall, Staffordshire, 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. Robert Williams Buchanan: caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner.
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. Robert Williams Buchanan: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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