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.
Edgar A. Guest
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England, on 20 August 1881, and died in Detroit, Michigan, on 5 August 1959, fifteen days before his seventy-eighth birthday. During much of his long life, he was among the most familiar poets in the United States. His name appeared daily in newspapers, his verses were memorized in schools and recited at civic meetings, and his books sold in quantities that many more critica…
“I am a newspaperman who writes verse.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, then a bustling coastal town in Massachusetts, and died on 24 March 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his lifetime he became, by a considerable margin, the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century. His verses were memorized in schools, recited in parlors, printed in newspapers, sung, parodied, and carried across the Atlantic…
“The human voice is the organ of the soul; the organs of the body are merely instruments.”
About 4,980 km separate Birmingham, England from Portland, Maine, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Edgar A. Guest: birmingham, detroit, people's poet, a heap o' livin', just folks, the path to home, it couldn't be done, nellie crossman. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: portland maine, bowdoin college, nathaniel hawthorne, frances appleton, paul revere’s ride, the village blacksmith, the song of hiawatha, outre-mer.
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.
Edgar A. Guest: Joy, Tenderness, Peace. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder.
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