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.
James Joyce
T. S. Eliot
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…
“It was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…
“We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary.”
About 6,296 km separate Dublin, Ireland from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.
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.
James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
Compare their emotional landscapesInstall V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.