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 Greenleaf Whittier
Richard Henry Dana
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 Greenleaf Whittier was born on 17 December 1807 on his family’s farm in the East Parish of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and died on 7 September 1892 in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. During his long life, the United States changed from a young republic into an industrial and continental power scarred by civil war, and Whittier became one of the most widely read literary witnesses to that transformation. He was a poe…
“Better heresy of doctrine than heresy of heart.”
Richard Henry Dana, born on 15 November 1787 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead there on 2 February 1879, belonged to the first generation of American writers who attempted to make literature in the young republic something more than a colonial echo of English models. He was a poet, critic, editor, lawyer, lecturer, and influential member of Boston’s literary world. Yet he has long occupied an unstable place in li…
“There was certainly some mistake about the time of my birth—I'm an impersonated Anachronism.”
About 47 km separate Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Massachusetts.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
John Greenleaf Whittier: haverhill, new hampshire, william lloyd garrison, american anti-slavery society, quaker, legends of new england, poems written during the progress of the abolition question, ichabod. Richard Henry Dana: massachusetts, the buccaneer, two years before the mast, ruth charlotte smith, anthology club, harvard college, francis dana, elizabeth ellery dana.
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 Greenleaf Whittier: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness. Richard Henry Dana: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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