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…
“Anything that promotes the knowledge of Wordsworth would be acceptable to me.”
The Victorian era produced many remarkable figures who straddled the worlds of literature and public service, but few navigated this dual existence with quite the complexity of Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831-1891), better known to the literary world by his pen name Owen Meredith. Born into literary aristocracy and destined for diplomatic greatness, Lytton embodied the tensions and contradiction…
“The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself.”
They overlapped for 16 years (1831–1846).
When Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton was born, Sir Aubrey de Vere was about 43.
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton was about 15 when Sir Aubrey de Vere died.
About 609 km separate
Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland from
London, England.
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.
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton:
owen meredith, viceroy of india, clytemnestra, the wanderer, lucile, benjamin disraeli, delhi durbar, second afghan war.
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.
