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.
Joseph Blanco White
Robert Southey
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Joseph Blanco White was born José María Blanco y Crespo on the 11th of July, 1775, in a house on a street corner in the old Jewish quarter of Seville, not far from the city's great cathedral. He would die sixty-five years later, in May 1841, in Liverpool, a city about as different from sun-bleached Andalusia as nineteenth-century Europe could offer, and the distance between those two places, geographic and spiritual,…
“I never allowed myself to put opinions upon the shelf as settled for ever.”
Robert Southey was born in Bristol on 12 August 1774 and died at Greta Hall, near Keswick in the Lake District, on 21 March 1843. During his lifetime he was among the most visible men of letters in Britain: a poet, historian, biographer, reviewer, editor, translator, political commentator, children’s writer, and, from 1813 until his death, Poet Laureate. Yet posterity has treated him unevenly. He is often remembered…
“How unendurable would life be if it were not for the belief that we shall meet again in a better state of existence.”
About 1,587 km separate Seville, Andalusia, Spain from Bristol, 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.
Joseph Blanco White: seville, liverpool, roman catholic priest, unitarianism, el español, manuel de arjona, observations on heresy and orthodoxy, doblado's letters from spain. Robert Southey: bristol, greta hall, lake district, pantisocracy, edward fricker, samuel taylor coleridge, joan of arc, thalaba the destroyer.
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.
Joseph Blanco White: Wonder, Sorrow, Spirituality. Robert Southey: Sorrow, Irony, Wonder.
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