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.
Edmund William Gosse
Lewis Carroll
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edmund William Gosse occupies a peculiar and fascinating position in the landscape of English literature. Neither wholly a major poet nor a minor footnote, he exists instead as a crucial connector, a literary ambassador who bridged the austere certainties of Victorian England with the modernist experiments of the twentieth century. Born on September 21, 1849, in London, and dying on May 16, 1928, in the same city, Go…
“A sheep in sheep's clothing.”
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who became immortal under the name Lewis Carroll, was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, England, and died on 14 January 1898 at Guildford, Surrey. He was a Victorian clergyman, Oxford mathematician, logician, lecturer, photographer, inventor, letter writer, satirist, and author of some of the most celebrated imaginative literature in the English language. Yet the word “author”…
“Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
About 267 km separate London, England from Daresbury, Cheshire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Edmund William Gosse: london, philip henry gosse, emily bowes, on viol and flute, king erik, pre-raphaelites, henrik ibsen, father and son. Lewis Carroll: daresbury, cheshire, guildford, victorian clergyman, oxford mathematician, alice's adventures in wonderland, through the looking-glass, jabberwocky.
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.
Edmund William Gosse: Tenderness, Peace, Longing. Lewis Carroll: Irony, Joy, Wonder.
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