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
Robert Williams Buchanan
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.”
On a warm August morning in 1841, in the quiet Staffordshire village of Caverswall, Robert Williams Buchanan was born on August 18. He entered a world already marked by ideological fervor and social upheaval, for his father, Robert Buchanan senior, was no ordinary parent but a passionate advocate of Robert Owen's socialist schemes, traveling the country as an itinerant lecturer preaching cooperation and radical socia…
“Originality, in the eyes of the modern Minerva, is a rather offensive form of vagabondism; but to be mediocre is to be highly respectable.”
About 8,051 km separate Kolkata, India from Caverswall, Staffordshire, 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. Robert Williams Buchanan: caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner.
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. Robert Williams Buchanan: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.