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.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on 30 August 1797 and dead on 1 February 1851, occupied an extraordinary position in British literary history from the beginning of her life. She was the daughter of two of the most provocative writers of the late eighteenth century: the political philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her name ha…
“The world changes whether we consent to it or not, and wisdom lies partly in learning when to resist and when to yield.”
Neighbourhood:
Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
In the hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…
“But, Degas, it is not with ideas that one makes verse. It is with words.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
They overlapped for 10 years (1842–1851).
When Stéphane Mallarmé was born, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was about 45.
Stéphane Mallarmé was about 9 when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died.
About 344 km separate
Somers Town, London, England from
Paris, Île-de-France, France.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:
frankenstein, villa diodati, percy bysshe shelley, william godwin, history of a six weeks' tour, romanticism, gothic fiction, lake geneva.
Stéphane Mallarmé:
paris, symbolists, surrealists, l'azur, hérodiade, l'après-midi d'un faune, claude debussy, mardis.
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.
