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.
Edward Lear
William Brighty Rands
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edward Lear was born on 12 May 1812 at Holloway, then a semi-rural northern suburb of London, and died at San Remo, Italy, on 29 January 1888. He is now cherished as one of the great makers of English literary nonsense: the author of “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “The Jumblies,” “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and hundreds of limericks populated by improbable old persons, birds, cats, Quangle Wangles, and creatures wh…
“I am very fond of children, but I do not like their parents.”
William Brighty Rands was born on 24 December 1823, in Chelsea, then a district on the western edge of London and already a place where commerce, domestic life, artistic ambition, and metropolitan poverty met in close quarters. He died on 23 April 1882, having lived only fifty-eight years, and his name is now far less familiar than the names of several Victorian writers whose work has dated more severely. Yet Rands o…
“Ugly things made me ache all over — a public house, for instance, dirt, a black-eye, a butcher's shop — indeed, almost everything disgusted me, except skies, trees, women and children, and books.”
About 9 km separate Holloway, London, England from Chelsea, London, 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.
Edward Lear: san remo, the owl and the pussycat, the jumblies, the dong with a luminous nose, nonsense poetry, chichester fortescue, franklin lushington, illustrations of the family of psittacidae. William Brighty Rands: chelsea, victorian children's literature, lilliput levee, matthew browne, lilliput lectures, court of chancery, industrial revolution, legal writing.
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.
Edward Lear: Wonder, Joy, Peace. William Brighty Rands: Joy, Wonder, Irony.
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