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
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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…
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. Her arrival marked the first in her family born in England in over two centuries, as the Barrett fortune stemmed from vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. The family soon moved to Hope End, a sprawling estate near Ledbury in Herefordshire…
“I am not desponding by nature, and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons—the wisdom of cheerfulness—and the duty of social intercourse.”
About 5,072 km separate Concord, Massachusetts, USA from Durham, England. 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.
Henry David Thoreau: concord, massachusetts, john thoreau, ralph waldo emerson, civil disobedience, walden, a week on the concord and merrimack rivers, transcendentalism. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: county durham, hope end, the battle of marathon, the seraphim and other poems, the cry of the children, robert browning, sonnets from the portuguese, aurora leigh.
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. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness.
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