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.
Emily Brontë
Elizabeth Stoddard
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, near Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and died on 19 December 1848 at Haworth, Yorkshire. She lived only thirty years, published one novel and a small body of verse during her lifetime, travelled little, and left behind few direct explanations of herself. Yet the apparent narrowness of her outward life stands in startling contrast to the imaginative sca…
“Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction.”
On a spring day in 1823, in the small coastal village of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a child was born who would grow to become one of the most original and underappreciated voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Elizabeth Drew Barstow entered the world on May 6, in a town where the rhythms of the sea shaped daily existence and where salt spray and shipbuilding defined the community's character. The second…
“Alice, after I am gone take good care of Dick, and, for Heaven’s sake, go out and buy him a couple of new shirts.”
About 5,114 km separate Thornton, Yorkshire, England from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, USA. 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.
Emily Brontë: wuthering heights, haworth, yorkshire moors, patrick brontë, charlotte brontë, anne brontë, gondal, poems by currer, ellis, and acton bell. Elizabeth Stoddard: mattapoisett, new york city, richard henry stoddard, nathaniel hawthorne, the morgesons, two men, temple house, wheaton female seminary.
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.
Emily Brontë: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality. Elizabeth Stoddard: Sorrow, Wonder, Spirituality.
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