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.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Leigh Hunt
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
William Makepeace Thackeray was born on 18 July 1811 in Calcutta, British India, into a family whose comfort and status were closely connected to the expanding machinery of the East India Company. His father, Richmond Thackeray, was a civil servant and collector of revenue; his mother, Anne Becher Thackeray, came from a socially ambitious Anglo-Indian family. Although Thackeray would become one of the great interpret…
“A good laugh is sunshine in a house.”
James Henry Leigh Hunt, known throughout his literary life as Leigh Hunt, was born on 19 October 1784 at Southgate, then a village north of London, and died at Putney on 28 August 1859. He was a poet, essayist, journalist, editor, critic, translator, dramatist, and indefatigable friend to writers whose fame would eventually eclipse his own. To describe him merely as a minor Romantic poet is to miss the range of his a…
“The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.”
About 7,959 km separate Kolkata, India from Southgate, London, England. 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.
William Makepeace Thackeray: calcutta, east india company, charterhouse, trinity college, isabella gethin shawe, lady ritchie, vanity fair, the book of snobs. Leigh Hunt: southgate, putney, john keats, percy bysshe shelley, the examiner, the feast of the poets, the story of rimini, cockney school of poetry.
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.
William Makepeace Thackeray: Tenderness, Despair, Sorrow. Leigh Hunt: Tenderness, Joy, Wonder.
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