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.
William Butler Yeats
Gerald Gould
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at Sandymount, County Dublin, and died on 28 January 1939 at Menton, France. During the seventy-three years between those dates, he became not merely Ireland’s most internationally celebrated modern poet but one of the major writers in English. Poet, dramatist, essayist, editor, cultural organizer, senator, and tireless architect of literary institutions, Yeats made a car…
“Think like a wise man, but communicate in the language of the people.”
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.”
About 398 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Scarborough, 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.
William Butler Yeats: sandymount, county dublin, menton, maud gonne, the wanderings of oisin, the second coming, sailing to byzantium, abbey theatre. 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.
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.
William Butler Yeats: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Gerald Gould: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality.
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