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 Smith
Ada Cambridge
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London on 4 May 1749 and died at Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey, on 28 October 1806. During her lifetime she was known not only as a poet but as one of the most productive and commercially important writers in Britain. She published poetry, novels, children’s books, translations, and educational works while sustaining a large family and enduring a marriage, a debt crisis,…
“The sonnet is perhaps the most difficult species of poetry.”
Ada Cambridge, who would become one of colonial Australia's most prolific and quietly subversive literary voices, was born on 21 November 1844 at St Germans, Norfolk, England. She was the second child of Thomasine and Henry Cambridge, a gentleman farmer of comfortable means. The Norfolk countryside, with its flat, expansive skies and ancient, weathered churches, would seep into her imagination and later resurface in…
“All such losses have been amply compensated for, no doubt—I am not of those who, having outlived them, insist that the old times were better than the new—but they are losses, notwithstanding.”
About 173 km separate Stoke next Guildford, Surrey, England from St Germans, Norfolk, 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.
Charlotte Smith: london, elegiac sonnets, the old manor house, the emigrants, nicholas turner, benjamin smith, french revolution, georgian england. Ada Cambridge: st germans, norfolk, george frederick cross, the retrospect, hymns on the litany, hymns on the holy communion, up the murray, a marked man.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Charlotte Smith: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Ada Cambridge: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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