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.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and dead 22 March 1832 in Weimar, became during his own lifetime a European institution: poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, civil servant, theater director, scientific investigator, memoirist, and theorist of culture. To call him Germany’s greatest writer is conventional but not empty praise. Goethe helped give the German language a literary authori…
“The life of man is his character.”
Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan, later Caroline Norton and, in the final months of her life, Lady Stirling-Maxwell, was born in London on 22 March 1808 and died in London on 15 June 1877. She was a poet, novelist, dramatist, political hostess, journalist, pamphleteer, and one of the most consequential campaigners for married women’s legal rights in nineteenth-century Britain. Her fame during her lifetime rested partly on…
“A woman has no redress for the wrongs inflicted upon her by her husband, unless she can obtain a separation under circumstances which the law recognises.”
About 639 km separate Frankfurt, Germany from Mayfair, London. 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.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: frankfurt am main, weimar, sturm und drang, the sorrows of young werther, götz von berlichingen, anna katharina schönkopf, friederike brion, charlotte von stein. Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan: london, caroline henrietta callander, the sorrows of rosalie, the undying one, george chapple norton, lord melbourne, custody of infants act 1839, richard brinsley sheridan.
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.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow. Caroline Elizabeth Sheridan: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.
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