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.
Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow, was born on 10 June 1781 in the Temple, London, and died at Brighton on 4 June 1829, six days before his forty-eighth birthday. He lived during one of the most turbulent and brilliant eras in English literary history: the age of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Regency, and the flowering of Romantic poetry. Yet he occupied an unusual position within that age…
Neighbourhood:
Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, born in 1730 and dead on 13 February 1809, occupies an unusual but revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was a career cavalry officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, a man connected by birth and service to the highest military and courtly circles, and the author of a short poem whose best-known stanza has outlived nearly everything else he wrote. “One crowded ho…
They overlapped for 29 years (1781–1809).
When Edward Hovell-Thurlow was born, Thomas Osbert Mordaunt was about 51.
Edward Hovell-Thurlow was about 28 when Thomas Osbert Mordaunt died.
Edward Hovell-Thurlow:
temple, london, brighton, second baron thurlow, thomas thurlow, anne bere, edward thurlow, charterhouse school, magdalen college, oxford.
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt:
lieutenant-general, battle of warburg, the call, georgian britain, colonel charles mordaunt, princess augusta, richard howe, william howe.
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.