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.
In the spring of 1863, the Victorian literary world witnessed a phenomenon that would become increasingly rare in the annals of English poetry: the overnight success of a provincial poet whose work captured both popular imagination and critical acclaim. Jean Ingelow, a banker's daughter from the Lincolnshire fens, achieved what many seasoned writers could only dream of—instant fame through a single collection of poem…
“I have lived to know that the secret of happiness is never to allow your energies to stagnate.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
On a spring morning in the Catskill Mountains, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sits beneath a gnarled apple tree, notebook in hand, watching a hermit thrush build its nest. This is John Burroughs in his element—not in a library or lecture hall, but in the cathedral of nature itself. For more than six decades, Burroughs served as America's interpreter of the natural world, transforming simple observations of…
“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Nature Poets, Transcendentalists, Victorian Poets
About 5,450 km separate
Boston, Lincolnshire, England from
Roxbury, New York, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Jean Ingelow:
boston, lincolnshire fens, the high tide on the coast of lincolnshire, 1571, poems, orriss, gerald massey, jane and ann taylor, off the skelligs.
John Burroughs:
catskill mountains, roxbury, new york, walt whitman, ralph waldo emerson, wake-robin, slabsides, riverby, theodore roosevelt.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
