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.
George Santayana
J.M. Synge
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
George Santayana, born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás on 16 December 1863 in Madrid and dead in Rome on 26 September 1952, was one of the most elegant and elusive figures in American intellectual life. He was a philosopher, literary critic, poet, novelist, memoirist, teacher, and aphorist; yet no single profession completely contains him. Although he spent his formative adult years at Harvard and wr…
“The family is one of nature's masterpieces.”
In the pantheon of Irish literature, few figures cast as long a shadow as John Millington Synge, a man who compressed into his brief thirty-seven years a literary output that would reshape the very notion of Irish dramatic art. Born on April 16, 1871, into the comfortable Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry of County Dublin, Synge would grow to become one of Ireland's most celebrated and controversial playwrights, creating…
“The poetry of the drama is not in the words, but in the situation.”
About 1,451 km separate Madrid, Spain from Dublin, Ireland. 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.
George Santayana: madrid, rome, harvard, william james, lucifer: a theological tragedy, a hermit of carmel, sonnets and other verses, catholic atheist. J.M. Synge: county dublin, trinity college dublin, the aran islands, william butler yeats, hodgkin's disease, in the shadow of the glen, riders to the sea, the playboy of the western world.
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.
George Santayana: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. J.M. Synge: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow.
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