Charles Wolfe, born on 14 December 1791 and dead on 21 February 1823, occupies a small but secure territory in the history of poetry written in English. His name is inseparable from “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,” a poem so concise, grave, and memorable that it has long outlived the circumstances of its composition and, in many readers’ minds, eclipsed the life of the man who wrote it. For much of the n…
Compare Poets
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.
Poet A
Charles Wolfe
Poet B
Laurence Binyon
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 76%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“It is within humanity, not outside it, that we must seek for the authority of art.”
In time
Charles Wolfe
Laurence Binyon
1791
1943
Their lives did not overlap.
46 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 269 km separate Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare, Ireland from Lancaster, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Charles Wolfe
Laurence Binyon
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
From the biographies
Charles Wolfe: blackhall, county kildare, theobald wolfe, frances wolfe, the burial of sir john moore after corunna, trinity college dublin, anglo-irish ascendancy, peninsular war. Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon.
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.
The world around them
Charles Wolfe
Laurence Binyon
Emotional landscapes
Charles Wolfe: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.