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.
Emily Dickinson
Elizabeth Stoddard
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died there on 15 May 1886. During her lifetime she was known, if at all beyond her immediate circle, as the daughter of a prominent local family, an unusually lively correspondent, a gardener, and eventually a woman who lived with increasing privacy. After her death, she emerged as one of the most startling and essential poets in th…
“Morning without you is a dwindled Dawn.”
On a spring day in 1823, in the small coastal village of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a child was born who would grow to become one of the most original and underappreciated voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Elizabeth Drew Barstow entered the world on May 6, in a town where the rhythms of the sea shaped daily existence and where salt spray and shipbuilding defined the community's character. The second…
“As I have not many good qualities of disposition I feel sure of this, which as many a member of my family have told me, makes me often hateful. My father said once he never saw any human being with such a talent for the disagreeable.”
About 162 km separate Amherst, Massachusetts, USA from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Massachusetts.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Emily Dickinson: amherst, massachusetts, edward dickinson, susan gilbert, because i could not stop for death, fascicles, mount holyoke female seminary, civil war. Elizabeth Stoddard: mattapoisett, new york city, richard henry stoddard, nathaniel hawthorne, the morgesons, two men, temple house, wheaton female seminary.
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.
Emily Dickinson: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing. Elizabeth Stoddard: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality.
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