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
Frederick Tennyson was born on 5 June 1807 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, the eldest child of the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson and Elizabeth Fytche Tennyson. He died on 26 February 1898, at Belle Vue House in Jersey, aged ninety. The dates of his life place him almost exactly within the long Victorian century, though his sensibility was formed earlier, amid the unsettled intellectual climate of the Regency…
They overlapped for 23 years (1807–1829).
When Frederick Tennyson was born, Edward Hovell-Thurlow was about 26.
Frederick Tennyson was about 22 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.
Frederick Tennyson:
somersby rectory, lincolnshire, alfred lord tennyson, trinity college cambridge, greek literature, browne medal, cambridge apostles, maria giuliotti.
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.