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
Elizabeth Stoddard
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.”
On a spring day in 1823, in the small coastal village of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a child was born who would grow to become one of the most original and underappreciated voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Elizabeth Drew Barstow entered the world on May 6, in a town where the rhythms of the sea shaped daily existence and where salt spray and shipbuilding defined the community's character. The second…
“With me, if you start in a friendship, you will have to begin and go on—with entire, perhaps disagreeable truth, candor, sincerity. There is not one particle of ‘nonsense’ about me. I cannot stand blarney, roundaboutedness.”
About 5,278 km separate Stoke next Guildford, Surrey, England from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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. Elizabeth Stoddard: mattapoisett, new york city, richard henry stoddard, nathaniel hawthorne, the morgesons, two men, temple house, wheaton female seminary.
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. Elizabeth Stoddard: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.