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
Emily Brontë
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.”
Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, near Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and died on 19 December 1848 at Haworth, Yorkshire. She lived only thirty years, published one novel and a small body of verse during her lifetime, travelled little, and left behind few direct explanations of herself. Yet the apparent narrowness of her outward life stands in startling contrast to the imaginative sca…
“Parents love their children; this is a principle of nature. The doe does not fear the dogs when her little one is in danger; the bird dies on its nest.”
About 83 km separate Liverpool, England from Thornton, 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. Emily Brontë: wuthering heights, haworth, yorkshire moors, patrick brontë, charlotte brontë, anne brontë, gondal, poems by currer, ellis, and acton bell.
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. Emily Brontë: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality.
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