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
Joseph Blanco White
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…
“Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.”
Joseph Blanco White was born José María Blanco y Crespo on the 11th of July, 1775, in a house on a street corner in the old Jewish quarter of Seville, not far from the city's great cathedral. He would die sixty-five years later, in May 1841, in Liverpool, a city about as different from sun-bleached Andalusia as nineteenth-century Europe could offer, and the distance between those two places, geographic and spiritual,…
“I never allowed myself to put opinions upon the shelf as settled for ever.”
About 391 km separate Madrid, Spain from Seville, Andalusia, Spain. Shared ground: Spain.
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. Joseph Blanco White: seville, liverpool, roman catholic priest, unitarianism, el español, manuel de arjona, observations on heresy and orthodoxy, doblado's letters from spain.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
George Santayana: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Joseph Blanco White: Wonder, Sorrow, Spirituality.
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