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.
Lydia Huntley Sigourney
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Lydia Huntley Sigourney, born Lydia Howard Huntley on 1 September 1791 in Norwich, Connecticut, became one of the most widely read, industrious, and culturally influential American writers of the nineteenth century. During the height of her career, her poems were printed in newspapers and magazines, memorized by schoolchildren, recited at funerals, quoted from pulpits, and displayed in family albums. She wrote for re…
“The Sabbath is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, the Shelley family home near Horsham in Sussex, and died on 8 July 1822, drowned in the Gulf of Spezia off the Italian coast before he had reached his thirtieth birthday. The extraordinary compression of his life has encouraged a legend of Shelley as the beautiful, doomed Romantic rebel: an ethereal poet, political prophet, atheist, lover, exile, and vict…
“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”
About 5,387 km separate Norwich, Connecticut, USA from Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, 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.
Lydia Huntley Sigourney: norwich, connecticut, sweet singer of hartford, moral pieces, traits of the aborigines of america, indian names, charles sigourney, daniel wadsworth. Percy Bysshe Shelley: field place, gulf of spezia, sussex, thomas jefferson hogg, harriet westbrook, mary godwin, queen mab, the necessity of atheism.
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.
Lydia Huntley Sigourney: Sorrow, Despair, Spirituality. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality.
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