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
Richard Henry Dana
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.”
Richard Henry Dana, born on 15 November 1787 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead there on 2 February 1879, belonged to the first generation of American writers who attempted to make literature in the young republic something more than a colonial echo of English models. He was a poet, critic, editor, lawyer, lecturer, and influential member of Boston’s literary world. Yet he has long occupied an unstable place in li…
“There was certainly some mistake about the time of my birth—I'm an impersonated Anachronism.”
About 158 km separate Portland, Maine, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Boston and Massachusetts.
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. Richard Henry Dana: massachusetts, the buccaneer, two years before the mast, ruth charlotte smith, anthology club, harvard college, francis dana, elizabeth ellery dana.
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. Richard Henry Dana: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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