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.
Charles Dickens
J.G. Holland
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in a modest terraced house at 1 Mile End Terrace in Landport, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. The second of eight children born to John and Elizabeth Dickens, his arrival came during a time of naval activity and modest aspirations in a bustling port town. His father, John, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, was a genial, improvident man whose love for literature,…
“He must win the battle of life with his own hand, and with his own eyes.”
Josiah Gilbert Holland, known to his immense nineteenth-century readership as J. G. Holland and, in his newspaper essays, as “Timothy Titcomb,” was born on 24 July 1819 in Belchertown, Massachusetts, and died on 12 October 1881 in New York City. During his lifetime he occupied an unusually broad place in American literary culture: he was a physician by training, a journalist, editor, moral essayist, novelist, biograp…
“The secret of success is constancy to purpose.”
About 5,323 km separate Portsmouth, Hampshire, England from Belchertown, Massachusetts, USA. 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.
Charles Dickens: portsmouth, chatham, catherine hogarth, oliver twist, the pickwick papers, sketches by boz, bleak house, great expectations. J.G. Holland: belchertown, massachusetts, timothy titcomb, bitter-sweet, kathrina: her life and mine, history of western massachusetts, springfield republican, samuel bowles.
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.
Charles Dickens: Despair, Sorrow, Spirituality. J.G. Holland: Spirituality, Longing, Sorrow.
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