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.
On a warm August morning in 1841, in the quiet Staffordshire village of Caverswall, Robert Williams Buchanan was born on August 18. He entered a world already marked by ideological fervor and social upheaval, for his father, Robert Buchanan senior, was no ordinary parent but a passionate advocate of Robert Owen's socialist schemes, traveling the country as an itinerant lecturer preaching cooperation and radical socia…
“Popularity is the falsest of all tests to apply to the work of any artist or thinker.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
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…
“While war is a possibility man is little better than a savage and civilisation the mere moments of rest between a succession of nightmares.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, War Poets
They overlapped for 9 years (1893–1901).
When Robert Nichols was born, Robert Williams Buchanan was about 52.
Robert Nichols was about 8 when Robert Williams Buchanan died.
Robert Williams Buchanan:
caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner.
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.
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.
