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 Henry Taylor
Charles Mackay
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 Henry Taylor occupies one of the more curious niches in nineteenth-century English letters: a poet who spent his working life not in garrets or universities but behind the desk of a government office, quietly shaping the administration of Britain's colonies while writing, in his spare hours, verse dramas that made him, for a brief and dazzling season, one of the most celebrated writers in the land. He was born on…
“Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinions of others.”
Charles Mackay was born in Perth, Scotland, on 27 March 1814, and died in London on 24 December 1889. During a long and unusually various career, he became known as a poet, songwriter, editor, journalist, historian of London, commentator on social life, and author of one of the nineteenth century’s most durable books of cultural psychology, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He was never quite…
“Millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
About 227 km separate Bishop Middleham, County Durham, England from Perth, Scotland. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Sir Henry Taylor: bishop middleham, county durham, george taylor, sir james stephen, philip van artevelde, isaac comnenus, edwin the fair, the virgin widow. Charles Mackay: perth, extraordinary popular delusions, the madness of crowds, cheer boys cheer, the good time coming, morning chronicle, glasgow argus, victorian man of letters.
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 Henry Taylor: Tenderness, Sorrow, Spirituality. Charles Mackay: Longing, Joy, Peace.
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