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
J.M. Synge
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.”
In the pantheon of Irish literature, few figures cast as long a shadow as John Millington Synge, a man who compressed into his brief thirty-seven years a literary output that would reshape the very notion of Irish dramatic art. Born on April 16, 1871, into the comfortable Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry of County Dublin, Synge would grow to become one of Ireland's most celebrated and controversial playwrights, creating…
“The poetry of the drama is not in the words, but in the situation.”
About 1,199 km separate Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France from Dublin, Ireland. 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. J.M. Synge: county dublin, trinity college dublin, the aran islands, william butler yeats, hodgkin's disease, in the shadow of the glen, riders to the sea, the playboy of the western world.
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. J.M. Synge: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow.
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