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.
Edward Lear
Philip Freneau
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edward Lear was born on 12 May 1812 at Holloway, then a semi-rural northern suburb of London, and died at San Remo, Italy, on 29 January 1888. He is now cherished as one of the great makers of English literary nonsense: the author of “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “The Jumblies,” “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and hundreds of limericks populated by improbable old persons, birds, cats, Quangle Wangles, and creatures wh…
“Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils.”
Philip Morin Freneau was born on 2 January 1752 in New York City and died on 18 December 1832 near his home in Monmouth County, New Jersey. During his long and restless life, he became a poet, sailor, merchant, editor, polemicist, farmer, husband, father, and partisan journalist. He has often been called the “Poet of the American Revolution,” a useful but incomplete title. Freneau did give memorable literary shape to…
“This is the last time I shall enter into such a business; it worries me to death and by no means suits my giddy, wandring brain.”
About 5,570 km separate Holloway, London, England from New York City, New York, 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.
Edward Lear: san remo, the owl and the pussycat, the jumblies, the dong with a luminous nose, nonsense poetry, chichester fortescue, franklin lushington, illustrations of the family of psittacidae. Philip Freneau: new york city, monmouth county, the rising glory of america, james madison, hugh henry brackenridge, the wild honey suckle, the indian burying ground, the british prison ship.
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.
Edward Lear: Wonder, Joy, Peace. Philip Freneau: Tenderness, Sorrow, Despair.
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