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.
John Clare
Gerard Manley Hopkins
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Clare was born on 13 July 1793 in Helpston, a village then in Northamptonshire and now associated with Cambridgeshire, and died on 20 May 1864 in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He came to be called the “peasant poet,” a phrase that helped sell his first books but also diminished him by making his social origins seem more important than his imagination. Clare was indeed the son of agricultural labourers, a m…
“I am a poet, and I know it, though I cannot boast of learning.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, in Stratford, Essex, which has since been absorbed into the bustling expanse of Greater London. He entered the world as the eldest of what would become nine children in a prosperous, artistic, and devout High Church Anglican family. His father, Manley Hopkins, was a successful marine insurance adjuster who also served as the Hawaiian consul-general in London and dabble…
“Sprung rhythm is measured by feet of from one to four syllables, regularly, and the feet are either trochees or dactyls.”
About 116 km separate Helpston, Northamptonshire, England from Stratford, Essex, England. Both have ground in Essex.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
John Clare: helpston, northamptonshire, peasant poet, mary joyce, martha turner, poems descriptive of rural life and scenery, the village minstrel, the mores. Gerard Manley Hopkins: stratford, essex, robert bridges, the wreck of the deutschland, sprung rhythm, oxford movement, john henry newman, society of jesus, terrible sonnets.
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.
John Clare: Tenderness, Wonder, Spirituality. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.
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