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.
Ronald Ross
Sydney Dobell
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
On a sweltering August evening in 1897, in a ramshackle laboratory in Secunderabad, India, a British army surgeon made a discovery that would save millions of lives. After dissecting his twentieth mosquito of the day, Ronald Ross finally observed what he had been seeking for years: the malarial parasite nestled within the insect's gut. That night, exhausted but exultant, he composed a poem celebrating his breakthroug…
“The mosquito is the most dangerous animal in the world.”
Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of buying, selling, accounting, travelling, and maintaining credit would remain an important fact of Sydney’s…
“Now love is the great means of self-negation: and you will find that you may accurately test the health and quality of your love by the degree to which self grows imperceptible to you.”
About 6,741 km separate Almora, Uttarakhand, India from Cranbrook, Kent, 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.
Ronald Ross: secunderabad, nobel prize, malaria transmission, in exile, ronald campbell, rosa bessie bloxam, the child of ocean, patrick manson. Sydney Dobell: cranbrook, the roman, sydney yendys, balder, alexander smith, spasmodic poets, crimean war, the youth of europe.
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.
Ronald Ross: Wonder, Irony, Spirituality. Sydney Dobell: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.