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.
Walter J. Turner
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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 early twentieth-century poetry, certain names blaze with enduring brilliance while others flicker in the margins of literary history, their contributions underappreciated or nearly forgotten. Walter James Redfern Turner, born on October 13, 1884, in South Melbourne, Australia, belongs to this latter category—a poet, critic, and cultural polymath whose work once commanded the admiration of W.B. Yeat…
“I can confidently and in soberness declare that Wagner is a colossal fraud.”
Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…
“It is hard to believe in God; but it is harder not to believe. I believe in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I find in man.”
About 16,839 km separate Melbourne, Victoria, Australia from Somersby, Lincolnshire, 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.
Walter J. Turner: south melbourne, w.b. yeats, delphine marguerite dubuis, the hunter and other poems, romance, georgian poetry, bloomsbury, siegfried sassoon. Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses.
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.
Walter J. Turner: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow.
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