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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Robert Herrick
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, in Stratford, Essex, which has since been absorbed into the bustling expanse of Greater London. He entered the world as the eldest of what would become nine children in a prosperous, artistic, and devout High Church Anglican family. His father, Manley Hopkins, was a successful marine insurance adjuster who also served as the Hawaiian consul-general in London and dabble…
“Nothing is so beautiful as spring.”
Robert Herrick was born in London on 24 August 1591 and died at Dean Prior in Devon on 15 October 1674. He is remembered as one of the supreme lyric poets of seventeenth-century England: a writer capable of making a four-line epigram feel as complete as a polished jewel, and of making flowers, ribbons, country festivals, kisses, bells, tears, and prayer seem charged with extraordinary significance. His poetry is ofte…
“The soul's a thing immortal, and therefore must not be enslaved to mortal things.”
About 89 km separate Stratford, Essex, England from Cheapside, London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: stratford, essex, robert bridges, the wreck of the deutschland, sprung rhythm, oxford movement, john henry newman, society of jesus, terrible sonnets. Robert Herrick: london, dean prior, george villiers, carpe diem, to the virgins, to make much of time, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, upon a child that died, ben jonson.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. Robert Herrick: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.
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