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
William Hughes Mearns
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.”
William Hughes Mearns entered the world on September 28, 1875, in the bustling streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of James H. Mearns and Lelia Cora Evans. From his very first breaths in that vibrant Quaker City, young William—soon to be known simply as Hughes Mearns—seemed destined to bridge the realms of imagination and instruction. He would grow into a man who taught the world not merely how to write, b…
“Whenever creative work with children flourishes I seek the one who has opened up communication with them on the side of their secret, unexpressed selves.”
About 5,474 km separate Daresbury, Cheshire, England from Camden, New Jersey, 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. William Hughes Mearns: philadelphia, bearsville, the pedagogue, harvard university, john dewey, creative youth, u.s. army medical corps, the little man who wasn't there.
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. William Hughes Mearns: Irony, Wonder, Fear.
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