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.
Robert Burns
William Edmondstoune Aytoun
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in the parish of Alloway, near Ayr, in southwestern Scotland, and died in Dumfries on 21 July 1796. In the relatively brief span of thirty-seven years, he became Scotland’s best-loved poet, a major maker and remaker of song, an incisive satirist, and an emblem of democratic fellow feeling. His reputation has sometimes obscured the complicated human being beneath it. Burns was…
“The appellation of a Scottish poet, I am proud of.”
“Aytoun was one of those rare spirits who could marry wit with patriotism, and scholarship with song.” William Edmondstoune Aytoun was born on the 21st of June, 1813, in Edinburgh — that granite nest of poets, philosophers, and lawyers, often called the ‘Athens of the North’. To be born in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century was, for a young man of letters, a sort of birthright into Scotland’s intellectual aris…
About 107 km separate Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland from Edinburgh, Scotland. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Burns: alloway, dumfries, william burnes, jean armour, the twa dogs, to a mouse, the holy fair, kilmarnock edition. William Edmondstoune Aytoun: edinburgh, scottish identity, the book of ballads, lays of the scottish cavaliers, jacobite uprisings, blackwood's edinburgh magazine, the bon gaultier ballads, jane emily wilson.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Robert Burns: Tenderness, Longing, Joy. William Edmondstoune Aytoun: Tenderness, Joy, Peace.
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