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.
Robert Williams Buchanan
George Cabot Lodge
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“Mere dogmas seldom explain human character.”
The story of George Cabot Lodge is a story of two shadows: one cast by the immense, looming silhouette of a politically titanic father, and the other, the long, penumbral shadow of a premature and tragic end. Within the brief span of thirty-six years, Lodge crafted a body of work that was unapologetically intellectual, earnestly philosophical, and deeply romantic, seeking nothing less than to articulate the soul’s st…
“Life — our life, his life, the life of the human soul — is quite continuous, I'm convinced: one thing with another, big and little, sad and gay, real and false, and the whole business just life, which is its own punishment and reward, its own beginning and end.”
About 5,089 km separate Caverswall, Staffordshire, England from Boston, Massachusetts, 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.
Robert Williams Buchanan: caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner. George Cabot Lodge: boston, nahant, william james, george santayana, the song of the wave, poems, the great adventure, cain.
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.
Robert Williams Buchanan: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. George Cabot Lodge: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness.
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