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.
Anne Whitney
Ebenezer Jones
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
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…
“Do you think I am in danger of floundering into moral mush? I don't.”
Ebenezer Jones was born in Islington, then a northern suburb of London, on 20 January 1820, and died in London on 14 September 1860, only forty years old. During his lifetime he was almost wholly unknown as a poet, and for decades after his death his name survived chiefly as a curiosity in bibliographies and among a small number of readers with a taste for neglected Victorian oddities. Yet his reputation gradually al…
About 5,273 km separate Watertown, Massachusetts, USA from Islington, London, England. 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.
Anne Whitney: watertown, massachusetts, james monroe, civil war, abolition, women's rights, the lone parting, equinoxial, ethiopia. Ebenezer Jones: islington, studies of sensation and event, victorian poetry, percy bysshe shelley, john keats, robert browning, chartism, commercial realities.
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.
Anne Whitney: Sorrow, Spirituality, Irony. Ebenezer Jones: Sorrow, Despair, Spirituality.
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