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
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
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.”
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, born Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida on February 17, 1836, in Seville, and dead in Madrid on December 22, 1870, became one of the most beloved and influential voices in Spanish poetry despite publishing no definitive collection of his poems during his lifetime. His reputation rests chiefly on the Rimas, brief lyric poems of extraordinary intimacy, and the Leyendas, prose tales in whic…
“The logic knows how to forge unassailable arguments which, nevertheless, do not convince. How easily precise conclusions are drawn from a false premise.”
About 0 km separate Seville, Andalusia, Spain from Seville, Andalusia, Spain. Both have ground in Seville and Andalusia.
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. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: seville, madrid, rimas, leyendas, valeriano bécquer, jose domínguez insausti, manuela monahay, narciso campillo.
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. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder.
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