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.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Barry Cornwall
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans, born Felicia Dorothea Browne on 25 September 1793 and dead on 16 May 1835, was among the most celebrated poets of the early nineteenth century. In her lifetime she was read with an enthusiasm now difficult to imagine: her poems circulated throughout Britain, Ireland, the United States, and the British Empire; they appeared in annuals, schoolbooks, anthologies, newspapers, and domestic parlors…
“O how many deaths there are in the world for the affections!”
Bryan Waller Procter, known to generations of readers by the literary name Barry Cornwall, was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 21 November 1787, and died in London on 5 October 1874. He belonged to that broad, fascinating company of early nineteenth-century writers who stood close to the great Romantic generation without ever wholly entering its innermost circle. He was not a poet of Byron’s volcanic self-dramatization,…
“When we encounter a new idea it surprises us, and we begin to doubt and examine it—and this is thought.”
About 101 km separate Liverpool, England from Leeds, Yorkshire, 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.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans: liverpool, gwrych, abergele, casabianca, the forest sanctuary, modern greece, the sceptic, dartmoor prison. Barry Cornwall: leeds, charles lamb, adelaide anne procter, dramatic scenes and other poems, the life of edmund kean, english songs, the sea, touch us gently, time!.
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.
Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Barry Cornwall: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.
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