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.
D. H. Lawrence
James Joyce
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at 8a Victoria Street in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, an English coal-mining town whose physical landscape, class divisions, and social pressures would remain central to his imagination. He was the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a coal miner, and Lydia Beardsall Lawrence, née Beardsall, a former pupil-teacher from a family with stronger educational and middle-…
“Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.”
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…
“The artist should be a passive rather than an active member of the State, having at his disposal the agency of beauty and not politics.”
About 332 km separate Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England from Dublin, Ireland. 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.
D. H. Lawrence: eastwood, nottinghamshire, sons and lovers, the rainbow, frieda weekley, jesse chambers, ford madox ford, georgian pastoralism. James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste.
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.
D. H. Lawrence: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow. James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.
Compare their emotional landscapesInstall V2Melody
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