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.
Charles Williams
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.
On a crisp September morning in 1886, in the shabby-genteel precincts of Holloway, North London, Charles Walter Stansby Williams entered a world that would never quite know what to make of him. The only son of Richard Walter Stansby Williams and Mary Wall, young Charles was born into circumstances that trembled on the edge of respectability. His father, a journalist and foreign business correspondent who wrote in Fre…
“God is not a thing among things.”
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”…
“It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
About 266 km separate Islington, London, England from Daresbury, Cheshire, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
Charles Williams: st albans, oxford university, florence conway, c.s. lewis, t.s. eliot, the silver stair, war in heaven, descent into hell. 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.
Charles Williams: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Lewis Carroll: Irony, Joy, Wonder.
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