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.
Aubrey Thomas de Vere was born on 10 January 1814 at Curragh Chase, the family estate near Adare in County Limerick, Ireland, and died there on 20 January 1902, ten days after his eighty-eighth birthday. He belonged to a world of inherited land, cultivated learning, Protestant Ascendancy privilege, and literary ambition, yet much of his life was spent interrogating the moral assumptions of that world. In the course o…
Robert Williams Parry, known in literature as R. Williams Parry, was born on 6 March 1884 at Talysarn in the Nantlle Valley of Caernarfonshire, north-west Wales, and died on 4 January 1956. He became one of the most admired Welsh-language poets of the twentieth century, though he was never a prolific author in the ordinary commercial sense. His reputation rests instead upon a relatively small body of exceptionally fi…
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
They overlapped for 19 years (1884–1902).
When R. Williams Parry was born, Aubrey Thomas de Vere was about 70.
R. Williams Parry was about 18 when Aubrey Thomas de Vere died.
About 295 km separate
Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland from
Talysarn, Gwynedd, Wales.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Aubrey Thomas de Vere:
curragh chase, county limerick, protestant ascendancy, william wordsworth, john henry newman, the waldenses, the search after proserpine, great famine.
R. Williams Parry:
talysarn, nantlle valley, yr haf a cherddi eraill, the summer and other poems, y llwynog, the fox, cynghanedd, welsh-language poetry.
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.