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
James Ballantine
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.”
James Ballantine was born on 11 June 1806 in the West Port of Edinburgh, that atmospheric warren of narrow wynds and ancient tenements huddled beneath the towering shadow of Edinburgh Castle. The air there carried the mingled scents of brewing malt, woodsmoke, and the damp promise of the nearby Meadows, a place where history and everyday grit intertwined like threads in a tartan. His father, also named James, was a b…
About 2,075 km separate Seville, Andalusia, Spain from Edinburgh, Scotland. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
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. James Ballantine: edinburgh, margaret anderson, the gaberlunzie's wallet, the miller of deanhaugh, robert burns, stained-glass painting, a treatise on painted glass, sir william allan.
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. James Ballantine: Wonder, Spirituality, Joy.
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