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
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. Her arrival marked the first in her family born in England in over two centuries, as the Barrett fortune stemmed from vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. The family soon moved to Hope End, a sprawling estate near Ledbury in Herefordshire…
“I never wrote a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took me at the right moment!”
About 7,985 km separate Kolkata, India from Durham, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
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. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: county durham, hope end, the battle of marathon, the seraphim and other poems, the cry of the children, robert browning, sonnets from the portuguese, aurora leigh.
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. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.