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
George Orwell
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 earth has music for those who listen.”
George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in the small town of Motihari in the Bengal Presidency of British India, emerged as one of the twentieth century’s most piercing literary voices. Though often remembered first as a novelist and essayist whose works dissected totalitarianism, social injustice, and the hypocrisies of power, Orwell began his writing life with poetry. Those early verses, lyrical yet…
“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues.”
About 8,037 km separate Madrid, Spain from Motihari, Bengal, India. 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. George Orwell: motihari, bengal presidency, richard walmesley blair, ida mabel blair, st cyprian's, burma, down and out in paris and london, the road to wigan pier.
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. George Orwell: Irony, Longing, Sorrow.
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