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.
Charlotte Richardson, born on 5 March 1775 and dead on 26 September 1825, belongs to that large, increasingly important company of British women poets whose names survived in catalogues more securely than they survived in literary histories. Her career unfolded during a period when poetry was widely read, widely written, and yet unevenly preserved. The great names of Romanticism came to dominate later accounts of the…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Fanny Greville, born Frances Macartney about 1724 and dead on 28 July 1789, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in eighteenth-century English poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a small number of poems, above all “A Prayer for Indifference,” rather than on a large published oeuvre or a public literary career of the sort enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Yet the very modesty of her exta…
Neighbourhood:
Georgian Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
They overlapped for 15 years (1775–1789).
When Charlotte Richardson was born, Fanny Greville was about 51.
Charlotte Richardson was about 14 when Fanny Greville died.
Charlotte Richardson:
late georgian england, charlotte smith, poems on various subjects, devotional poetry, domestic sphere, moral reflection, religious feeling, elegy.
Fanny Greville:
county tyrone, anglo-irish, fulke greville, a prayer for indifference, the court of death, samuel johnson, eighteenth-century poetry, culture of sensibility.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.