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
John Greenleaf Whittier
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.”
John Greenleaf Whittier was born on 17 December 1807 on his family’s farm in the East Parish of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and died on 7 September 1892 in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. During his long life, the United States changed from a young republic into an industrial and continental power scarred by civil war, and Whittier became one of the most widely read literary witnesses to that transformation. He was a poe…
“Better heresy of doctrine than heresy of heart.”
About 5,293 km separate Stratford, Essex, England from Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States. 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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: stratford, essex, robert bridges, the wreck of the deutschland, sprung rhythm, oxford movement, john henry newman, society of jesus, terrible sonnets. John Greenleaf Whittier: haverhill, new hampshire, william lloyd garrison, american anti-slavery society, quaker, legends of new england, poems written during the progress of the abolition question, ichabod.
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.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing. John Greenleaf Whittier: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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