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.
Emma Lazarus
Oscar Wilde
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on 22 July 1849 and died there on 19 November 1887, only thirty-eight years later. Her name is now inseparable from “The New Colossus,” the sonnet whose plea for the world’s “tired,” “poor,” and “huddled masses” has become the verbal companion to the Statue of Liberty. Yet the familiarity of those lines has often obscured the larger achievement of the woman who wrote them. Lazar…
“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 at 21 Westland Row in Dublin, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom. He entered a household unusually rich in learning, performance, controversy, and public ambition. His father, Sir William Wilde, was an eminent surgeon specializing in diseases of the eye and ear, a respected medical writer, antiquarian, and collector of Irish folklore. His mother,…
“All art is at once surface and symbol.”
About 5,115 km separate New York City, New York, USA 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.
Emma Lazarus: new york city, the new colossus, moses lazarus, esther nathan, admetus and other poems, alide: an episode of goethe’s life, the spagnoletto, william cullen bryant. Oscar Wilde: speranza, requiescat, portora royal school, trinity college dublin, newdigate prize, poems, the picture of dorian gray, aestheticism.
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.
Emma Lazarus: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder. Oscar Wilde: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow.
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