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.
Gerald Gould
Gerald Griffin
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 landscape of early twentieth-century English poetry, Gerald Gould occupies a curious position—too well-known to have been forgotten entirely, yet too overlooked to claim his rightful place in the literary canon. Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1885 and raised in Norwich, Gould lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, a time when the certainties of the Victorian age gave way to the…
“Instinct, as Falstaff said, is a great matter; but it is not the whole.”
Gerald Griffin was born in Limerick on 12 December 1803 and died in Cork on 12 June 1840, before his thirty-seventh birthday. His life was brief, restless, and divided between two vocations that seemed, in his own mind, increasingly irreconcilable: literature and religious service. In less than two decades of serious writing, he became one of the most distinctive Irish novelists of the early nineteenth century, a poe…
“Nothing is more commonplace, either in prose or poetry, than for those who live in the bustle of the world to wish for some quiet little retreat in a lonely wild, where, free from cares... at the same time that, if the truth was known, they had rather die than give up their darling turmoil.”
About 573 km separate Scarborough, England from Limerick, Ireland. 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.
Gerald Gould: norwich, barbara ayrton, georgian poet, lyrics, an essay on the nature of lyric, united suffragists, men's league for women's suffrage, the happy tree and other poems. Gerald Griffin: limerick, cork, christian brothers, the collegians, ellen hanley, john scanlan, hardress cregan, eily o'connor.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Gerald Gould: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality. Gerald Griffin: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder.
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