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.
Robert Browning
William Makepeace Thackeray
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812 at Southampton Cottage, Camberwell, then a semi-rural district south of London, and died on 12 December 1889 in Venice. Few English poets have combined such audacity of intellect, dramatic energy, moral curiosity, and technical resourcefulness. During his lifetime he moved from the position of a puzzling, frequently mocked young writer to that of a revered elder of Victorian let…
“I believe in you absolutely, utterly.”
William Makepeace Thackeray was born on 18 July 1811 in Calcutta, British India, into a family whose comfort and status were closely connected to the expanding machinery of the East India Company. His father, Richmond Thackeray, was a civil servant and collector of revenue; his mother, Anne Becher Thackeray, came from a socially ambitious Anglo-Indian family. Although Thackeray would become one of the great interpret…
“The world is a looking-glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.”
About 7,959 km separate Camberwell, London, England from Kolkata, India. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Browning: southampton cottage, venice, dramatic monologue, elizabeth barrett browning, pauline: a fragment of a confession, my last duchess, porphyria's lover, pippa passes. William Makepeace Thackeray: calcutta, east india company, charterhouse, trinity college, isabella gethin shawe, lady ritchie, vanity fair, the book of snobs.
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.
Robert Browning: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder. William Makepeace Thackeray: Tenderness, Despair, Sorrow.
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