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.
Bret Harte
A.E.Housman
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Francis Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, and dead on 5 May 1902 in Camberley, Surrey, England, was the first American writer to make the Gold Rush West seem not merely picturesque or exotic but worthy of a literature of its own. Before Harte, the Pacific frontier had often appeared in Eastern writing as a distant field of adventure, speculation, and caricature. Harte helped g…
“I never use a club until I am tired of my work and want relief from it.”
Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation. The apparent contrast between these identities has long fascinated reade…
“Let a man acquire knowledge not because it is useful or ornamental, but because it is knowledge, and therefore good for man to acquire.”
About 5,263 km separate Albany, New York, USA from Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Bret Harte: albany, new york, camberley, surrey, gold rush, overland monthly, the luck of roaring camp, the outcasts of poker flat, anna griswold, samuel clemens. A.E.Housman: fockbury, bromsgrove, moses jackson, a shropshire lad, loveliest of trees, to an athlete dying young, when i was one-and-twenty, classical scholar.
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.
Bret Harte: Sorrow, Longing, Irony. A.E.Housman: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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