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.
Jonathan Swift
Elizabeth Thomas
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
The life of Jonathan Swift presents one of literature's most fascinating paradoxes: a clergyman who wrote with brutal satirical force, an Irishman who felt himself English, a conservative who championed the oppressed, and a misanthrope whose fury arose from disappointed idealism. Born into poverty and obscurity, Swift became one of the most powerful prose writers in the English language, creating works that continue…
“Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.”
Elizabeth Thomas, who wrote under the name “Corinna,” was born in 1675 and died in 1731. She belongs to that large and fascinating company of early eighteenth-century women writers whose lives survive only in fragments: poems, letters, dedications, hostile anecdotes, printers’ advertisements, and the recollections of men whose literary fame later eclipsed theirs. Yet Thomas was far more than a minor satellite of Alex…
About 286 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, Wales. 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.
Jonathan Swift: gulliver's travels, a modest proposal, the drapier's letters, esther johnson, william temple, the examiner, robert harley, henry st. john. Elizabeth Thomas: skenfrith, monmouthshire, corinna, richard gwinnett, pylades, alexander pope, miscellany poems on several subjects, eighteenth-century women writers.
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.
Jonathan Swift: Irony, Joy, Fear. Elizabeth Thomas: Despair, Sorrow, Anger.
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