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.
On a spring morning in the Catskill Mountains, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sits beneath a gnarled apple tree, notebook in hand, watching a hermit thrush build its nest. This is John Burroughs in his element—not in a library or lecture hall, but in the cathedral of nature itself. For more than six decades, Burroughs served as America's interpreter of the natural world, transforming simple observations of…
“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Nature Poets, Transcendentalists, Victorian Poets
Ralph Hodgson was born on 9 September 1871 in Darlington, County Durham, and died on 3 November 1962 in Minerva, Ohio. His life traversed an astonishing stretch of history: the late Victorian industrial world, the upheaval of two world wars, the flowering and fragmentation of literary modernism, and the gradual emergence of a more public consciousness about animals and the natural environment. Yet his poetry seems to…
“He was annoyed by my wanting to talk about Black and Tan terriers instead of poetry, but his Black and Tan is poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
They overlapped for 51 years (1871–1921).
When Ralph Hodgson was born, John Burroughs was about 34.
Ralph Hodgson was about 50 when John Burroughs died.
John Burroughs:
catskill mountains, roxbury, new york, walt whitman, ralph waldo emerson, wake-robin, slabsides, riverby, theodore roosevelt.
Ralph Hodgson:
darlington, minerva, ohio, the bull, the last blackbird, poems, the song of honour, eve, time, you old gipsy man.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
