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.
Paul-Jean Toulet
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Paul-Jean Toulet was born on 5 June 1867 in Pau, in the Béarn region of southwestern France, and died on 6 September 1920 at Guéthary, on the Basque coast. He occupies a singular place in French literature: neither wholly Symbolist nor conventionally modernist, neither simply a Decadent aesthete nor merely a regional poet of nostalgia. He was a writer of poems, novels, criticism, aphorisms, and journalism, but his la…
“Il n'est de grand amour qu'à l'ombre d'un grand rêve.”
Patrick Reginald Chalmers was born on 27 June 1872 at Brechin, Angus, Scotland, and died on 12 September 1942. He belonged to that substantial but now less frequently discussed group of early twentieth-century British writers whose literary lives flourished outside the most conspicuous movements of their age. Chalmers was neither an avant-garde modernist nor a public prophet of national importance. He did not seek to…
“An extra twenty pounds spread over eight working years, or more, of love, companionship and pride in possession is no sum to consider at all.”
About 1,503 km separate Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France from Brechin, Angus, Scotland. 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.
Paul-Jean Toulet: pau, béarn, guéthary, mauritius, jean toulet, les contrerimes, monsieur du paur, les tendres ménages. Patrick Reginald Chalmers: brechin, angus, green days and blue days, a picker of pebbles, punch and judy, at the tail of the weir, the obsessive angler, rugby school.
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.
Paul-Jean Toulet: Joy, Wonder, Peace. Patrick Reginald Chalmers: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace.
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