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.
Sir Aubrey de Vere
Francis Hastings Doyle
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Sir Aubrey de Vere, born Aubrey Hunt on 28 August 1788 and dead on 5 July 1846, was an Irish poet, dramatist, landowner, magistrate, and baronet whose life joined literary aspiration to the duties and assumptions of the Anglo-Irish governing class. He is now frequently encountered as the father of the better-known poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere, and that relationship has sometimes obscured the elder man’s own achievement…
“The poet's function is not to describe nature, but to interpret it.”
Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“Like champagne, the brightest iridescences of wit depend upon the surrounding atmosphere, and cease to shine when they cease to reflect its immediate influence.”
About 529 km separate Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland from Nunappleton, Yorkshire. 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.
Sir Aubrey de Vere: curragh chase, county limerick, aubrey thomas de vere, william wordsworth, lord byron, mary spring rice, thomas spring rice, anglo-irish governing class. Francis Hastings Doyle: victorian ideals, the private of the buffs, sir francis hastings doyle, barrister, oxford professor, balliol college, eton, the duke of monmouth.
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.
Sir Aubrey de Vere: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow.
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