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.
Charles Tennyson Turner
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Charles Tennyson Turner was born Charles Turner on 4 July 1808 at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire, and died on 25 April 1879 at Grasby, also in Lincolnshire. He lived during the long Victorian transformation of English literary culture, yet his own life retained a strongly local character: he was a country clergyman, a husband, a brother in an unusually gifted family, and a poet whose finest achievements were small…
“The lacing of tree to tree by a bat’s flight is a graceful image.”
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, born in 1730 and dead on 13 February 1809, occupies an unusual but revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was a career cavalry officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, a man connected by birth and service to the highest military and courtly circles, and the author of a short poem whose best-known stanza has outlived nearly everything else he wrote. “One crowded ho…
About 193 km separate Somersby, Lincolnshire, England from London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Charles Tennyson Turner: somersby rectory, lincolnshire, alfred tennyson, frederick tennyson, poems by two brothers, trinity college cambridge, vicar of grasby, louisa sellwood. Thomas Osbert Mordaunt: lieutenant-general, battle of warburg, the call, georgian britain, colonel charles mordaunt, princess augusta, richard howe, william howe.
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.
Charles Tennyson Turner: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness. Thomas Osbert Mordaunt: Tenderness, Sorrow, Longing.
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