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
William Butler Yeats
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…
“The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises.”
William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at Sandymount, County Dublin, and died on 28 January 1939 at Menton, France. During the seventy-three years between those dates, he became not merely Ireland’s most internationally celebrated modern poet but one of the major writers in English. Poet, dramatist, essayist, editor, cultural organizer, senator, and tireless architect of literary institutions, Yeats made a car…
“The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.”
About 140 km separate Belfast, Northern Ireland from Dublin, Ireland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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. William Butler Yeats: sandymount, county dublin, menton, maud gonne, the wanderings of oisin, the second coming, sailing to byzantium, abbey theatre.
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. William Butler Yeats: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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