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.
Arthur Shearly Cripps was born on 10 June 1869, the son of Charles Alfred Cripps, later the first Baron Parmoor, and Theresa Potter Cripps. He belonged, by birth and education, to the privileged English world that supplied many of the administrators, clergy, soldiers, and writers of the British Empire. Yet the course of his life led him into a searching and often lonely quarrel with that world. He became an Anglican…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Social Justice Poets, Welsh Poets
Louis MacNeice was born on 12 September 1907 in Belfast, the youngest child of John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret Clesham. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman who would later become a bishop, and the family moved shortly after Louis's birth to Carrickfergus, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where the boy grew up in the rectory beneath the squat Norman keep of the castle. It was an apparent…
“I don't believe in pure form. I don't believe in pure anything.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
They overlapped for 46 years (1907–1952).
When Louis MacNeice was born, Arthur Shearly Cripps was about 38.
Louis MacNeice was about 45 when Arthur Shearly Cripps died.
Arthur Shearly Cripps:
southern rhodesia, st faith’s mission, the black christ, africa for africans, first chimurenga, cecil rhodes, oxford movement, trinity college oxford.
Louis MacNeice:
belfast, carrickfergus, william macneice, mary ezra, autumn journal, snow, letters from iceland, the dark tower.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.