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.
Alfred Austin
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Alfred Austin was born on 30 May 1835 at Headingley, then a village just outside Leeds in Yorkshire, and died on 2 June 1913 at Ashford, Kent. For seventeen years, from 1896 until his death, he held the conspicuous and difficult office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Yet his name has endured less securely than those of the poets who preceded and surrounded him. To later readers, Austin has often appeared chie…
“Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.”
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“I have been represented as saying with Baudelaire, ‘Art for Art’, and laying myself open to all the unfavourable limitations which that dictum is unjustly supposed to imply.”
About 267 km separate Leeds, Yorkshire, England from Ealing, London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Alfred Austin: headingley, leeds, poet laureate, the garden that i love, the tower of babel, savonarola, stonyhurst college, lord salisbury. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston.
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.
Alfred Austin: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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