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.
Lewis Carroll
Edmund Clarence Stedman
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 Lutwidge Dodgson, who became immortal under the name Lewis Carroll, was born on 27 January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, England, and died on 14 January 1898 at Guildford, Surrey. He was a Victorian clergyman, Oxford mathematician, logician, lecturer, photographer, inventor, letter writer, satirist, and author of some of the most celebrated imaginative literature in the English language. Yet the word “author”…
“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
In the heart of nineteenth-century American letters stands a figure who defied easy categorization, a man who straddled two seemingly incompatible worlds with remarkable grace. Edmund Clarence Stedman, born on October 8, 1833, in Hartford, Connecticut, would become known as the "Bard of Wall Street," a sobriquet that captured both the paradox and the peculiar achievement of his life. For forty-five years, he navigate…
“Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music.”
About 5,188 km separate Daresbury, Cheshire, England from Hartford, Connecticut, 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.
Lewis Carroll: daresbury, cheshire, guildford, victorian clergyman, oxford mathematician, alice's adventures in wonderland, through the looking-glass, jabberwocky. Edmund Clarence Stedman: hartford, bard of wall street, elizabeth clementine stedman, new york city, the norwich tribune, how old brown took harper's ferry, pan in wall street, yale university.
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.
Lewis Carroll: Irony, Joy, Wonder. Edmund Clarence Stedman: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.