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.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edward FitzGerald
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.”
Edward FitzGerald was born Edward Purcell on 31 March 1809 at Bredfield House, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, and died on 14 June 1883 at Merton, Norfolk. He occupies an unusual position in English literary history. He wrote original prose, verse, letters, dialogues, and adaptations, translated from Spanish, Greek, and Persian, and moved in circles that included Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Tho…
“These Rubáiyát are not a translation, but an imitation.”
About 5,197 km separate Portland, Maine, USA from Bredfield, Suffolk, England. 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.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: portland maine, bowdoin college, nathaniel hawthorne, frances appleton, paul revere’s ride, the village blacksmith, the song of hiawatha, outre-mer. Edward FitzGerald: bredfield house, the rubáiyát of omar khayyám, alfred tennyson, william makepeace thackeray, trinity college cambridge, george crabbe, edward byles cowell, euphranor.
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.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder. Edward FitzGerald: Peace, Joy, Tenderness.
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