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.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Richard Le Gallienne
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 hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…
“But, Degas, it is not with ideas that one makes verse. It is with words.”
Richard Le Gallienne, born Richard Thomas Gallienne in Liverpool on 20 January 1866 and dead at Menton, France, on 15 September 1947, lived long enough to become both a participant in and a chronicler of several literary ages. He began as an ambitious young poet of the late Victorian aesthetic movement, came to public notice amid the bright notoriety of the 1890s, crossed the Atlantic to remake himself for an America…
“Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.”
About 622 km separate Paris, Île-de-France, France from Liverpool, England. Both have ground in Paris and Île-de-France.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
Stéphane Mallarmé: paris, symbolists, surrealists, l'azur, hérodiade, l'après-midi d'un faune, claude debussy, mardis. Richard Le Gallienne: liverpool, menton, oscar wilde, the yellow book, aesthetic movement, my ladies’ sonnets, the book-bills of narcissus, the quest of the golden girl.
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.
Stéphane Mallarmé: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing. Richard Le Gallienne: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.
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