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 Nichols
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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 pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…
“War doesn't ennoble: it degrades.”
In the pantheon of American letters, Thomas Bailey Aldrich occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully celebrated, he stands as a bridge figure between the rough-hewn democracy of antebellum American literature and the refined aestheticism that would characterize the Gilded Age. Born into a nation still finding its literary voice and dying in an America confidently asserting its cultural sophistication, A…
“A fine thing incomparably said instantly becomes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of dateless excellence.”
About 5,160 km separate Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Nichols: shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets. Thomas Bailey Aldrich: portsmouth, new hampshire, new orleans, lilian woodman, the bells: a collection of chimes, the ballad of babie bell, shiloh: a requiem, the story of a bad boy, james russell lowell.
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 Nichols: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Thomas Bailey Aldrich: Longing, Wonder, Peace.
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