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.
Leigh Hunt
John Banister Tabb
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 Henry Leigh Hunt, known throughout his literary life as Leigh Hunt, was born on 19 October 1784 at Southgate, then a village north of London, and died at Putney on 28 August 1859. He was a poet, essayist, journalist, editor, critic, translator, dramatist, and indefatigable friend to writers whose fame would eventually eclipse his own. To describe him merely as a minor Romantic poet is to miss the range of his a…
“Every day is a little life: and our whole life is but a day repeated.”
In the world of American poetry, few figures embody such remarkable contrasts as John Banister Tabb (March 22, 1845 – November 19, 1909), a man whose life journey carried him from the battlefields of the Confederacy to the quiet halls of a Catholic seminary, from the drawing rooms of Virginia aristocracy to a prison cell where poetry first awakened in his soul. Known affectionately as "Father Tabb" throughout his lat…
“She is perhaps the best Catholic English writer, and Ruskin, whose life she wrote, calls her a great critic.”
About 6,073 km separate Southgate, London, England from Amelia County, Virginia, USA. 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.
Leigh Hunt: southgate, putney, john keats, percy bysshe shelley, the examiner, the feast of the poets, the story of rimini, cockney school of poetry. John Banister Tabb: the forest, father tabb, sidney lanier, catholic seminary, american civil war, blockade runner, point lookout, alfred curtis.
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.
Leigh Hunt: Tenderness, Joy, Wonder. John Banister Tabb: Wonder, Longing, Tenderness.
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