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.
Robert Stephen Hawker
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the rugged landscape of Victorian Cornwall, where granite cliffs meet the tempestuous Atlantic and ancient legends whisper through the mist, there lived a man whose life embodied the very essence of romantic poetry. Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875) was not merely a poet who happened to be a clergyman, nor simply a priest who dabbled in verse. He was a singular figure whose eccentric personality, passionate dedica…
“What a life mine would be if it were all written and published in a book.”
Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born on 30 June 1803 at Clifton, then a fashionable suburb near Bristol, and died at Basel, Switzerland, on 26 January 1849. He occupies an unusual and enduring position in English literature: neither comfortably Romantic nor Victorian, neither wholly a poet nor wholly a dramatist, neither merely a physician nor merely an eccentric amateur of science. His work belongs to the dark afterlife o…
“I am a poet, and therefore I am a liar.”
About 151 km separate Plymouth, Devon, England from Bristol, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Stephen Hawker: cornwall, morwenstow, charlotte i'ans, newdigate prize, pompeii, tendrils, records of the western shore, ecclesia. Thomas Lovell Beddoes: clifton, bristol, basel, humphry davy, maria edgeworth, the improvisatore, the brides’ tragedy, death’s jest-book.
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.
Robert Stephen Hawker: Spirituality, Wonder, Fear. Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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