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 Lord Tennyson
Sir Henry Taylor
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 Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…
“I wrote it in a few minutes, but it took me months to get it right.”
Sir Henry Taylor occupies one of the more curious niches in nineteenth-century English letters: a poet who spent his working life not in garrets or universities but behind the desk of a government office, quietly shaping the administration of Britain's colonies while writing, in his spare hours, verse dramas that made him, for a brief and dazzling season, one of the most celebrated writers in the land. He was born on…
“In our judgment of men, we are to beware of giving any great importance to occasional acts. By acts of occasional virtue weak men endeavour to redeem themselves in their own estimation, vain men to exalt themselves in that of mankind.”
About 188 km separate Somersby, Lincolnshire, England from Bishop Middleham, County Durham, 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.
Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses. Sir Henry Taylor: bishop middleham, county durham, george taylor, sir james stephen, philip van artevelde, isaac comnenus, edwin the fair, the virgin widow.
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 Lord Tennyson: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow. Sir Henry Taylor: Tenderness, Sorrow, Spirituality.
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