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.
Christopher Smart
Fanny Greville
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Christopher Smart was born on 11 April 1722 at Fairlawne, the estate near Shipbourne in Kent where his father, Peter Smart, worked as steward to the Vane family. He died on 21 May 1771, not 1770 as has sometimes been reported, in London after a life marked by extraordinary accomplishment, recurrent distress, financial insecurity, and long periods of confinement. Few English poets of the eighteenth century have seemed…
“For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.”
Fanny Greville, born Frances Macartney about 1724 and dead on 28 July 1789, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in eighteenth-century English poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a small number of poems, above all “A Prayer for Indifference,” rather than on a large published oeuvre or a public literary career of the sort enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Yet the very modesty of her exta…
About 178 km separate Shipbourne, Kent, England from 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.
Christopher Smart: fairlawne, shipbourne, peter smart, winifred griffiths smart, durham school, pembroke college, john newbery, mrs. mary midnight. Fanny Greville: county tyrone, anglo-irish, fulke greville, a prayer for indifference, the court of death, samuel johnson, eighteenth-century poetry, culture of sensibility.
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.
Christopher Smart: Wonder, Tenderness, Joy. Fanny Greville: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.