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.
William Morris
Andrew Marvell
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
The life of William Morris presents one of the most remarkable and multifaceted careers in Victorian literature and culture. Born on March 24, 1834, in Walthamstow, Essex, and dying on October 3, 1896, in Hammersmith, London, Morris packed into his sixty-two years an astonishing array of accomplishments as poet, designer, craftsman, printer, translator, socialist activist, and visionary. He remains a figure who defie…
“Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.”
Andrew Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, in the small village of Winestead in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and Anne Pease Marvell. The family soon moved to the bustling port town of Hull when the elder Marvell was appointed lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of the Charterhouse, a charitable institution. Young Andrew grew up amid the sounds of the sea and the…
“A Conformist to the established Rites of the Church of England, though I confess none of the most over-running or eager in them.”
About 251 km separate Lambeth, London, England from Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
William Morris: walthamstow, hammersmith, edward burne-jones, the defence of guenevere, the haystack in the floods, the life and death of jason, the earthly paradise, sigurd the volsung. Andrew Marvell: winestead, hull, trinity college, mary fairfax, upon appleton house, the garden, to his coy mistress, the mower's song.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
William Morris: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow. Andrew Marvell: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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