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
Edgar Allan Poe
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.”
Edgar Allan Poe stands as one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in American literature, a writer whose troubled life and haunting works have captivated readers for nearly two centuries. Born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, he would live only forty years before his mysterious death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland. Yet in that brief span, he revolutionized multiple litera…
“He that is born to be a man, neither should nor can be anything nobler, greater, or better than a man. The fact is, that in efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.”
About 5,215 km separate Somersby, Lincolnshire, England from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. 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.
Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses. Edgar Allan Poe: boston, richmond, baltimore, virginia clemm, john allan, tamerlane and other poems, the raven, the fall of the house of usher.
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. Edgar Allan Poe: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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