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
James Thomson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“Poetry is not the thing itself, but the expression of the thing.”
In the pantheon of Victorian poetry, few figures cast as long and dark a shadow as James Thomson, who wrote under the mysterious initials "B.V." Born on November 23, 1834, in Port Glasgow, Scotland, Thomson would become one of the most compelling and tragic voices of his generation, a poet whose work plumbed the depths of human despair while achieving moments of transcendent beauty. His life, marked by profound loss,…
“I know no subject more elevating, more amusing, more ready to awake the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of Nature. Where can we meet with such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?”
About 459 km separate Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland from Port Glasgow, Scotland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
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. James Thomson: port glasgow, b.v., the city of dreadful night, charles bradlaugh, george meredith, the doom of a city, royal military academy, philosophical skepticism.
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.
Sir Aubrey de Vere: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. James Thomson: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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