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.
Archibald MacLeish
Thomas Babington Macaulay
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the pantheon of twentieth-century American letters, few figures embodied as many contradictions and reconciliations as Archibald MacLeish. Born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois, and dying on April 20, 1982, in Boston, Massachusetts, MacLeish lived through nearly the entire span of the American century, bearing witness to two world wars, the Great Depression, the atomic age, and the cultural revolutions that re…
“The arts are the only way to escape the world without leaving it.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…
“He [Richard Steele] was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.”
About 6,220 km separate Glencoe, Illinois, USA from Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England. 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.
Archibald MacLeish: glencoe, illinois, harvard law school, ada hitchcock, the hamlet of a. macleish, conquistador, pulitzer prize, the happy marriage and other poems, the pot of earth. Thomas Babington Macaulay: rothley temple, leicestershire, edinburgh review, lays of ancient rome, whig history, trinity college, chancellor’s gold medal, john milton.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Archibald MacLeish: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Thomas Babington Macaulay: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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