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.
Sir Aubrey de Vere, born Aubrey Hunt on 28 August 1788 and dead on 5 July 1846, was an Irish poet, dramatist, landowner, magistrate, and baronet whose life joined literary aspiration to the duties and assumptions of the Anglo-Irish governing class. He is now frequently encountered as the father of the better-known poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere, and that relationship has sometimes obscured the elder man’s own achievement…
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821 and died there on 31 August 1867, leaving a body of work comparatively small in quantity but seismic in effect. Few writers have altered the possibilities of lyric poetry so decisively. Baudelaire inherited the grandeur and rhetoric of French Romanticism, yet he redirected poetry away from nature, historical spectacle, and heroic confession toward the nervou…
“Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
They overlapped for 26 years (1821–1846).
When Charles Baudelaire was born, Sir Aubrey de Vere was about 33.
Charles Baudelaire was about 25 when Sir Aubrey de Vere died.
About 889 km separate
Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland from
Paris, Île-de-France, France.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Sir Aubrey de Vere:
curragh chase, county limerick, aubrey thomas de vere, william wordsworth, lord byron, mary spring rice, thomas spring rice, anglo-irish governing class.
Charles Baudelaire:
paris, les fleurs du mal, jeanne duval, decadence, prose poetry, eugène delacroix, lycée louis-le-grand, mauritius.
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.