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.
Rabindranath Tagore
Charles Mackay
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Rabindranath Tagore, born on 7 May 1861 in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India, and dead on 7 August 1941 in the same city, was one of the rare writers whose life seems inseparable from the cultural history of a nation. Yet to call him merely India’s greatest modern poet is to reduce an astonishingly various career. He was a lyric poet, songwriter, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, letter wri…
“Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its grasp with a hold that kills it.”
Charles Mackay was born in Perth, Scotland, on 27 March 1814, and died in London on 24 December 1889. During a long and unusually various career, he became known as a poet, songwriter, editor, journalist, historian of London, commentator on social life, and author of one of the nineteenth century’s most durable books of cultural psychology, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He was never quite…
“The history of the world is but the history of the human mind, and the history of the human mind is but the history of its errors and its follies.”
About 8,042 km separate Kolkata, India from Perth, Scotland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Rabindranath Tagore: calcutta, bengal presidency, gurudev, debendranath tagore, mrinalini devi, santiniketan, manasi, sonar tari. Charles Mackay: perth, extraordinary popular delusions, the madness of crowds, cheer boys cheer, the good time coming, morning chronicle, glasgow argus, victorian man of letters.
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.
Rabindranath Tagore: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder. Charles Mackay: Longing, Joy, Peace.
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