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
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public intellectual. He was often called the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” after his most celebrated prose…
“Your private grief is sacred, and I almost hesitate to send this note.”
About 5,041 km separate Daresbury, Cheshire, England from Boston, 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.
Lewis Carroll: daresbury, cheshire, guildford, victorian clergyman, oxford mathematician, alice's adventures in wonderland, through the looking-glass, jabberwocky. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: cambridge, massachusetts, boston, old ironsides, the contagiousness of puerperal fever, the autocrat of the breakfast-table, amelia lee jackson, harvard college, hasty pudding club.
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. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.
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