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 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…
“Where there are large powers with little ambition nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes; for she has given the machinery without the vis motrix.”
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.”
They overlapped for 47 years (1800–1846).
When Sir Henry Taylor was born, Sir Aubrey de Vere was about 12.
Sir Henry Taylor was about 46 when Sir Aubrey de Vere died.
About 538 km separate
Bishop Middleham, County Durham, England from
Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Sir Henry Taylor:
bishop middleham, county durham, george taylor, sir james stephen, philip van artevelde, isaac comnenus, edwin the fair, the virgin widow.
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.
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.
