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.
Alphonse de Lamartine
Antoine Ó Raifteirí
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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.”
Antoine Ó Raifteirí, more commonly known in English as Anthony Raftery, was born around 30 March 1779 at Killedan, near Kiltimagh in County Mayo, and died on 25 December 1835 at Killeeneen, near Craughwell in County Galway. He occupies a singular place in Irish literary history: he was a blind, impoverished, itinerant poet who belonged to the living oral culture of Irish-speaking rural Ireland, yet he has also become…
“The Church and myself have it made out that it was not Death that was there, but the devil that came to tempt me.”
About 1,293 km separate Mâcon, Burgundy, France from Killedan, County Mayo, 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.
Alphonse de Lamartine: mâcon, burgundy, le lac, méditations poétiques, julie charles, voyage en orient, mary ann birch, romanticism. Antoine Ó Raifteirí: kiltimagh, county mayo, county galway, mary hynes, anois teacht an earraigh, cill aodáin, blind poet, itinerant poet.
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.
Alphonse de Lamartine: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Antoine Ó Raifteirí: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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