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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Alfred Lord Tennyson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, the Shelley family home near Horsham in Sussex, and died on 8 July 1822, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia off the Italian coast before he had reached his thirtieth birthday. The extraordinary compression of his life has encouraged a legend of Shelley as the beautiful, doomed Romantic rebel: an ethereal poet, political prophet, atheist, lover, exile, and vict…
“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”
Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…
“A good woman is a wondrous creature, cleaving to the right and the good in all change; lovely in her youthful comeliness, lovely all her life long in comeliness of heart.”
About 241 km separate Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, England from Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Both have ground in England and Sussex.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: field place, gulf of spezia, sussex, thomas jefferson hogg, harriet westbrook, mary godwin, queen mab, the necessity of atheism. Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses.
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.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow.
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