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.
J.G. Holland
Maurice Thompson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, known to his immense nineteenth-century readership as J. G. Holland and, in his newspaper essays, as “Timothy Titcomb,” was born on 24 July 1819 in Belchertown, Massachusetts, and died on 12 October 1881 in New York City. During his lifetime he occupied an unusually broad place in American literary culture: he was a physician by training, a journalist, editor, moral essayist, novelist, biograp…
“Calmness is the cradle of power.”
James Maurice Thompson arrived in this world on September 9, 1844, in the modest hamlet of Fairfield, Indiana, nestled within Franklin County, where his father served as a Baptist minister. The boy who would grow into one of the most versatile literary figures of the late nineteenth century spent his earliest years in the rustic Midwestern landscape, breathing in the simple rhythms of frontier life. Yet destiny had m…
“Genuine bird-song is simply the highest form of avian vocalization, by which instinctively, if not premeditatedly, the bird finds expression of pleasure.”
About 1,101 km separate Belchertown, Massachusetts, USA from Fairfield, Indiana, USA. Both have ground in New York City and New York.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
J.G. Holland: belchertown, massachusetts, timothy titcomb, bitter-sweet, kathrina: her life and mine, history of western massachusetts, springfield republican, samuel bowles. Maurice Thompson: fairfield, indiana, coosawattee river valley, confederate army, alice r. lee, will henry thompson, hoosier mosaics, the witchery of archery, national archery association.
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.
J.G. Holland: Spirituality, Longing, Sorrow. Maurice Thompson: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.
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