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.
Laurence Binyon
Francis Hastings Doyle
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“Art is essentially a conquest of matter by the spirit.”
Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“It has always been my belief that a more living knowledge of the past is to be obtained by studying the State Trials than by poring over formal narrations, however highly esteemed.”
About 103 km separate Lancaster, England from Nunappleton, Yorkshire. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon. Francis Hastings Doyle: victorian ideals, the private of the buffs, sir francis hastings doyle, barrister, oxford professor, balliol college, eton, the duke of monmouth.
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.
Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace. Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow.
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