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.
Louis MacNeice
D. H. Lawrence
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Louis MacNeice was born on 12 September 1907 in Belfast, the youngest child of John Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret Clesham. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman who would later become a bishop, and the family moved shortly after Louis's birth to Carrickfergus, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where the boy grew up in the rectory beneath the squat Norman keep of the castle. It was an apparent…
“Poetry must be honest even before it is beautiful.”
David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at 8a Victoria Street in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, an English coal-mining town whose physical landscape, class divisions, and social pressures would remain central to his imagination. He was the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a coal miner, and Lydia Beardsall Lawrence, née Beardsall, a former pupil-teacher from a family with stronger educational and middle-…
“I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.”
About 351 km separate Belfast, Northern Ireland from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Louis MacNeice: belfast, carrickfergus, william macneice, mary ezra, autumn journal, snow, letters from iceland, the dark tower. D. H. Lawrence: eastwood, nottinghamshire, sons and lovers, the rainbow, frieda weekley, jesse chambers, ford madox ford, georgian pastoralism.
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.
Louis MacNeice: Fear, Longing, Despair. D. H. Lawrence: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow.
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