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.
Hildegard of Bingen
Felicia Dorothea Hemans
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Hildegard of Bingen, born around 1098 and dead on 17 September 1179, was among the most astonishingly various voices of the twelfth century: abbess, visionary, theological writer, poet, composer, correspondent, preacher, administrator, and observer of the natural world. To call her simply a “medieval mystic,” though true as far as it goes, is to make her smaller than she was. Her life unfolded within the institutions…
“The soul is not in the body as in a house, but as a hinge is in a door.”
Felicia Dorothea Hemans, born Felicia Dorothea Browne on 25 September 1793 and dead on 16 May 1835, was among the most celebrated poets of the early nineteenth century. In her lifetime she was read with an enthusiasm now difficult to imagine: her poems circulated throughout Britain, Ireland, the United States, and the British Empire; they appeared in annuals, schoolbooks, anthologies, newspapers, and domestic parlors…
“My own inexperience in transactions of this nature is just what might be expected from one whose life has hitherto been passed among the Welsh mountains.”
About 873 km separate Bermersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany from Liverpool, England. 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.
Hildegard of Bingen: bermersheim, rhineland, scivias, symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum, jutta of sponheim, volmar, richardis of stade, abbess. Felicia Dorothea Hemans: liverpool, gwrych, abergele, casabianca, the forest sanctuary, modern greece, the sceptic, dartmoor prison.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Hildegard of Bingen: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness. Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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