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
Barry Cornwall
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.”
Bryan Waller Procter, known to generations of readers by the literary name Barry Cornwall, was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 21 November 1787, and died in London on 5 October 1874. He belonged to that broad, fascinating company of early nineteenth-century writers who stood close to the great Romantic generation without ever wholly entering its innermost circle. He was not a poet of Byron’s volcanic self-dramatization,…
“I do not know of any ancestors whom I have any right to boast of; they were small farmers during many generations.”
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. Barry Cornwall: leeds, charles lamb, adelaide anne procter, dramatic scenes and other poems, the life of edmund kean, english songs, the sea, touch us gently, time!.
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. Barry Cornwall: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.