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.
Fiona Macleod
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Fiona Macleod, whose published life ran from 12 September 1855 to 12 December 1905, was the most celebrated and perplexing literary identity created by the Scottish writer William Sharp. To call Fiona merely Sharp’s pseudonym, though factually necessary, is insufficient. She was a sustained artistic persona, a voice with its own apparent temperament, correspondence, friendships, themes, and public reputation. Through…
“The silence of the hills is the voice of God.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, then a bustling coastal town in Massachusetts, and died on 24 March 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his lifetime he became, by a considerable margin, the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century. His verses were memorized in schools, recited in parlors, printed in newspapers, sung, parodied, and carried across the Atlantic…
“The human voice is the organ of the soul; the organs of the body are merely instruments.”
About 4,723 km separate Paisley, Scotland from Portland, Maine, 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.
Fiona Macleod: scottish, celtic revival, pharais, the mountain lovers, the sin-eater, from the hills of dream, william sharp, bessie sharp. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: portland maine, bowdoin college, nathaniel hawthorne, frances appleton, paul revere’s ride, the village blacksmith, the song of hiawatha, outre-mer.
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.
Fiona Macleod: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder.
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