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.
Lady Anne Lindsay, later Lady Anne Barnard, was born on 8 December 1750 at Balcarres in Fife, Scotland, and died on 6 May 1825 in London. She is remembered above all as the author of “Auld Robin Gray,” one of the most affecting and durable songs in the Scottish literary tradition. Yet the ballad’s extraordinary afterlife has sometimes reduced its maker to a name attached to a single lyric. Her life was considerably l…
“When alone, I am not above five-and-twenty. I can entertain myself with a succession of inventions... I forget that I am sixty-eight, and if by chance I see myself in the glass looking very abominable — I do not care.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Scottish Poets, Women Poets
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…
“Shy and unready men are great betrayers of secrets; for there are few wants more urgent for the moment than the want of something to say.”
They overlapped for 26 years (1800–1825).
When Sir Henry Taylor was born, Lady Anne Lindsay was about 50.
Sir Henry Taylor was about 25 when Lady Anne Lindsay died.
Lady Anne Lindsay:
balcarres, cape colony, auld robin gray, james lindsay, andrew barnard, scottish ballad tradition, edinburgh, colonial official.
Sir Henry Taylor:
bishop middleham, county durham, george taylor, sir james stephen, philip van artevelde, isaac comnenus, edwin the fair, the virgin widow.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
