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.
Barry Cornwall
Clement Clarke Moore
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Bryan Waller Procter, known to generations of readers by the literary name Barry Cornwall, was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 21 November 1787, and died in London on 5 October 1874. He belonged to that broad, fascinating company of early nineteenth-century writers who stood close to the great Romantic generation without ever wholly entering its innermost circle. He was not a poet of Byron’s volcanic self-dramatization,…
“This pleasant pain, of which all poets have spoken, was mine.”
Clement Clarke Moore was born in New York City on 15 July 1779, into a family whose standing joined religious authority, learning, landholding, and old New York connections. He died on 10 July 1863, five days before his eighty-fourth birthday, having become a respected scholar, educator, churchman, landowner, and local civic figure. Yet history has remembered him overwhelmingly for a poem of fifty-six lines: “A Visit…
“It was written at the request of my children, and for their amusement, on Christmas Eve, 1822.”
About 5,405 km separate Leeds, Yorkshire, 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.
Barry Cornwall: leeds, charles lamb, adelaide anne procter, dramatic scenes and other poems, the life of edmund kean, english songs, the sea, touch us gently, time!. Clement Clarke Moore: new york city, a visit from st. nicholas, the night before christmas, benjamin moore, charity clarke moore, columbia college, general theological seminary, catharine elizabeth taylor.
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.
Barry Cornwall: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness. Clement Clarke Moore: Wonder, Joy, Tenderness.
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