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…
“I am doing what in me lies to keep alive poetry with a little conscience in it.”
In the hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…
“But, Degas, it is not with ideas that one makes verse. It is with words.”
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
They overlapped for 5 years (1842–1846).
When Stéphane Mallarmé was born, Sir Aubrey de Vere was about 54.
Stéphane Mallarmé was about 4 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.
Stéphane Mallarmé:
paris, symbolists, surrealists, l'azur, hérodiade, l'après-midi d'un faune, claude debussy, mardis.
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.
