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
Alfred Austin
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.”
Alfred Austin was born on 30 May 1835 at Headingley, then a village just outside Leeds in Yorkshire, and died on 2 June 1913 at Ashford, Kent. For seventeen years, from 1896 until his death, he held the conspicuous and difficult office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Yet his name has endured less securely than those of the poets who preceded and surrounded him. To later readers, Austin has often appeared chie…
“Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.”
About 5,110 km separate Concord, Massachusetts, USA from Leeds, Yorkshire, 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. Alfred Austin: headingley, leeds, poet laureate, the garden that i love, the tower of babel, savonarola, stonyhurst college, lord salisbury.
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. Alfred Austin: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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