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.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Charles Sorley
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…
“Everything in the world exists to culminate in a book.”
Charles Hamilton Sorley was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 19 May 1895, and was killed in France on 13 October 1915, not yet twenty-one years old. His literary life lasted only a few years, and his published body of verse was small, much of it assembled after his death. Yet he occupies a singular place among the poets of the First World War. Unlike writers whose work became famous through prolonged service, later dis…
“Mutual helplessness and lassitude, as when two boxers who have battered each other crouch dancing two paces from each other, waiting for the other to hit. This is not Hell as I hoped, but Limbo Lake with green growths on the water, full of minnows.”
About 967 km separate Paris, Île-de-France, France from Aberdeen, Scotland. Shared ground: France.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Stéphane Mallarmé: paris, symbolists, surrealists, l'azur, hérodiade, l'après-midi d'un faune, claude debussy, mardis. Charles Sorley: aberdeen, first world war, william ritchie sorley, robert graves, to germany, when you see millions of the mouthless dead, marlborough college, university college oxford.
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.
Stéphane Mallarmé: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing. Charles Sorley: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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