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
Ben King
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…
“Music is the universal language of mankind.”
Benjamin Franklin King Jr., known almost everywhere in print as Ben King, was born on 17 March 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, and died on 8 April 1894 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His life lasted only thirty-seven years, and his reputation has never approached that of the best-known American poets of his generation. Yet King was far from insignificant in his own day. He belonged to the large, lively, and now too often…
“If I should die to-night, and you should come to my cold corpse and say, weeping and longing, I would not care.”
About 1,260 km separate Portland, Maine, USA from St. Joseph, Michigan, USA. Shared ground: United States.
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. Ben King: st. joseph, michigan, bowling green, kentucky, if i should die to-night, late nineteenth-century, newspaper verse, comic prose, mark twain, james whitcomb riley.
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. Ben King: Irony, Sorrow, Despair.
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