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.
Henry David Thoreau
George Marion McClellan
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Henry David Thoreau was born on 12 July 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, and died there on 6 May 1862, only forty-four years later. During that comparatively brief life he became, almost paradoxically, one of the most durable presences in American letters. He was a poet, essayist, lecturer, surveyor, pencil maker, teacher, abolitionist, amateur scientist, and uncommonly attentive walker. Yet these labels, though usefu…
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
George Marion McClellan was born on 29 September 1860 near Belfast, Tennessee, and died on 17 May 1934. His lifetime stretched from the final year of slavery in the United States through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the consolidation of Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the Harlem Renaissance. To read his poetry only as the work of a minor late-Victorian versifier would be to miss the extraordinary his…
“They who write for us and fight our battles are essentially our only spokesmen.”
About 1,530 km separate Concord, Massachusetts, USA from Belfast, Tennessee, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Henry David Thoreau: concord, massachusetts, john thoreau, ralph waldo emerson, civil disobedience, walden, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, transcendentalism. George Marion McClellan: belfast, tennessee, fisk university, hartford theological seminary, paul laurence dunbar, james weldon johnson, poems, the path of dreams, harlem renaissance.
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.
Henry David Thoreau: Spirituality, Irony, Wonder. George Marion McClellan: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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