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 pantheon of 19th-century American artists, few figures embody the spirit of creative rebellion and social conscience as powerfully as Anne Whitney. Born into an era when women were expected to confine their artistic pursuits to watercolors and embroidery, Whitney defied convention to become one of America's most accomplished sculptors and a significant voice in poetry. Her ninety-four years spanned a transform…
“Old beggar women (and men) come around you and plead, with eighty or more winters in their wrinkles. I for one cannot refuse.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Charles Wolfe, born on 14 December 1791 and dead on 21 February 1823, occupies a small but secure territory in the history of poetry written in English. His name is inseparable from “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,” a poem so concise, grave, and memorable that it has long outlived the circumstances of its composition and, in many readers’ minds, eclipsed the life of the man who wrote it. For much of the n…
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Irish Poets, Victorian Poets
About 4,790 km separate
Watertown, Massachusetts, USA from
Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare, Ireland.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Anne Whitney:
watertown, massachusetts, james monroe, civil war, abolition, women's rights, the lone parting, equinoxial, ethiopia.
Charles Wolfe:
blackhall, county kildare, theobald wolfe, frances wolfe, the burial of sir john moore after corunna, trinity college dublin, anglo-irish ascendancy, peninsular war.
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.
