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 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…
“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.”
William Sidney Walker was born on 4 December 1795 at Pembroke, in the old maritime county of Pembrokeshire in South Wales, and died in London on 15 October 1846. He occupies an unusual place in nineteenth-century English literary history: he was at once a precocious poet, a brilliant classical scholar, an acute if sometimes severe critic, and one of the earliest serious investigators of Shakespeare’s metre and langua…
They overlapped for 36 years (1811–1846).
When William Makepeace Thackeray was born, William Sidney Walker was about 16.
William Makepeace Thackeray was about 35 when William Sidney Walker died.
William Makepeace Thackeray:
calcutta, east india company, charterhouse, trinity college, isabella gethin shawe, lady ritchie, vanity fair, the book of snobs.
William Sidney Walker:
pembroke, south wales, gustavus vasa, winthrop mackworth praed, john moultrie, trinity college cambridge, craven scholarship, porson prize.
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.
