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.
In the autumn of 1871, as France was still reeling from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and the violent suppression of the Paris Commune, a child was born in the Mediterranean port town of Sète who would become one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary intellects. Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry entered the world on October 30th, in a region where the brilliant southern light seemed to sharpe…
“Those who are foolish enough to love themselves, and those to hate themselves: two ways of being mistaken.”
Neighbourhood:
French Symbolists, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
On a crisp October morning in 1880, in the Scottish town of Kirkcudbright, a child was born who would grow up to capture the essence of Northern English working-class humor in verse. George Marriott Edgar entered the world on October 5th into a family already steeped in theatrical tradition, though no one could have predicted that this quiet, droll man of medium height would become one of Britain's most beloved comic…
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets
About 1,389 km separate
Sète, Occitanie, France from
Kirkcudbright, Scotland.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Paul Valéry:
sète, franco-prussian war, paris commune, symbolist movement, stéphane mallarmé, la jeune parque, le cimetière marin, charmes.
Marriott Edgar:
kirkcudbright, young albert ramsbottom, the lion and albert, the co-optimists, stanley holloway, pantomime dame, great war, royal sussex regiment.
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.
