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
James Beattie
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…
“It is very dismal to live in a world without flowers.”
James Beattie, born on 25 October 1735 and dead on 18 August 1803, occupied an unusual and revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was at once a Scottish professor, a poet of landscape and sensibility, a popular moral philosopher, a Christian apologist, a music lover, a man of sociable ambition, and a bereaved father whose final years were darkened by illness and loss. In his own lifetime he was fam…
“The pleasures of imagination are the most refined and exquisite of all.”
About 383 km separate Liverpool, England from Laurencekirk, Kincardineshire, Scotland. 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. James Beattie: laurencekirk, kincardineshire, the minstrel, original poems and translations, an essay on the nature and immutability of truth, samuel johnson, thomas gray, robert arbuthnot.
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. James Beattie: Sorrow, Longing, Spirituality.
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