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.
Amastan Ag Mohamed, conventionally dated c. 1803–1878 in modern retellings, occupies an unusual and revealing place in the imaginative history of Saharan literature. He is not a historically documented nineteenth-century Tuareg poet in the ordinary biographical sense. Rather, he is a fictional figure created to give a personal face to the cultural world from which traditional Tuareg desert poetry emerges. The name, t…
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Persian Mystic Poets
Alphonse de Lamartine was born on 21 October 1790 in Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and died in Paris on 1 March 1869. Poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, parliamentarian, and revolutionary statesman, he lived at the point where literary Romanticism and modern French political life came into being. Few writers have more completely embodied the nineteenth-century belief that eloquence might be a pub…
“La poésie est l'incarnation de la pensée humaine dans le langage humain.”
They overlapped for 67 years (1803–1869).
When Amastan Ag Mohamed was born, Alphonse de Lamartine was about 13.
Amastan Ag Mohamed was about 66 when Alphonse de Lamartine died.
Amastan Ag Mohamed:
saharan literature, tuareg poetry, hoggar mountains, kel ahaggar, biographical fiction, oral traditions, tamahaq language, tifinagh script.
Alphonse de Lamartine:
mâcon, burgundy, le lac, méditations poétiques, julie charles, voyage en orient, mary ann birch, romanticism.
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.