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
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.
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 will come next Monday—even though I promise.”
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 most important part of a man's education is that which he gives himself.”
About 119 km separate Albany, New York, USA from Belchertown, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in New York.
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. 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.
Bret Harte: Sorrow, Longing, Irony. J.G. Holland: Spirituality, Longing, Sorrow.
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