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
William Sidney Walker was born on 4 December 1795 at Pembroke, in the old maritime county of Pembrokeshire in South Wales, and died in London on 15 October 1846. He occupies an unusual place in nineteenth-century English literary history: he was at once a precocious poet, a brilliant classical scholar, an acute if sometimes severe critic, and one of the earliest serious investigators of Shakespeare’s metre and langua…
They overlapped for 35 years (1795–1829).
When William Sidney Walker was born, Edward Hovell-Thurlow was about 14.
William Sidney Walker was about 34 when Edward Hovell-Thurlow died.
Edward Hovell-Thurlow:
temple, london, brighton, second baron thurlow, thomas thurlow, anne bere, edward thurlow, charterhouse school, magdalen college, oxford.
William Sidney Walker:
pembroke, south wales, gustavus vasa, winthrop mackworth praed, john moultrie, trinity college cambridge, craven scholarship, porson prize.
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.