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.
James Joyce
John Boyle O'Reilly
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…
“Unfortunately, I have very little imagination. I am also a very bad critic.”
On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…
“For all time to come, the freedom and purity of the press are the test of national virtue and independence. No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.”
About 41 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Dowth, County Meath, Ireland. Shared ground: Ireland.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste. John Boyle O'Reilly: county meath, dowth castle, irish republican brotherhood, fenian movement, tenth hussars, boston pilot, father patrick mccabe, captain david r..
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.
James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. John Boyle O'Reilly: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow.
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