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.
In the pantheon of Victorian literature, few figures present such a delightful paradox as William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911). Here was a man who could craft lyrics of sublime wit and devastating social commentary, yet whose temperament was notoriously prickly and contentious. A writer who created some of the most beloved comic operas in the English language while maintaining a reputation as one of London's most dif…
“I am not a dramatic author; I am a maker of plays. I construct them as a carpenter constructs a table.”
Thomas Campbell was born on the twenty-seventh of July, 1777, in a house on Glasgow's High Street that has long since vanished beneath the changing face of the city. He was the youngest of eleven children born to Alexander Campbell, a merchant who had made and then lost a fortune trading with Virginia before the American war severed his commercial lifeline, and Margaret Campbell, whose family, like her husband's, tra…
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Irish Poets, Romantic Poets
They overlapped for 9 years (1836–1844).
When William Schwenck Gilbert was born, Thomas Campbell was about 59.
William Schwenck Gilbert was about 8 when Thomas Campbell died.
William Schwenck Gilbert:
southampton, lucy agnes turner, trial by jury, the sorcerer, h.m.s. pinafore, the mikado, the bab ballads, richard d'oyly carte.
Thomas Campbell:
glasgow, argyllshire, the pleasures of hope, lord ullin's daughter, glenara, hohenlinden, the battle of the baltic, ye mariners of england.
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.
