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 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…
“To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which lies in the delight of guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Richard Henry Horne entered the world in London on the last day of 1802 (though he himself, with characteristic contrariness, sometimes gave the date as New Year's Day 1803), the son of James Horne, a quarter-master in the 61st Regiment of Foot. His father's military postings took the family to Guernsey, where they lived until James Horne's death in 1810 left the boy fatherless at the age of seven or eight. The young…
“The price of the present edition is one farthing, in order to bring it within the reach of the million.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
They overlapped for 43 years (1842–1884).
When Stéphane Mallarmé was born, Richard Henry Horne was about 39.
Stéphane Mallarmé was about 42 when Richard Henry Horne died.
About 342 km separate
Paris, Île-de-France, France from
London, England.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Stéphane Mallarmé:
paris, symbolists, surrealists, l'azur, hérodiade, l'après-midi d'un faune, claude debussy, mardis.
Richard Henry Horne:
london, guernsey, royal military college, orion, hecatompylos, elizabeth barrett browning, william howitt, cosmo de' medici.
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.
