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.
In the quiet Connecticut countryside of Pomfret, on April 10, 1835, a child was born who would become one of the most influential literary figures of the late nineteenth century, though her name today is less remembered than the glittering circle of writers and artists she championed. Ellen Louise Chandler, who would later be known to the literary world as Louise Chandler Moulton, emerged from circumstances that seem…
“I was lonely, and I sought companions. What was there to do but to create them?”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
William Sidney Walker was born on 4 December 1795 at Pembroke, in the old maritime county of Pembrokeshire in South Wales, and died in London on 15 October 1846. He occupies an unusual place in nineteenth-century English literary history: he was at once a precocious poet, a brilliant classical scholar, an acute if sometimes severe critic, and one of the earliest serious investigators of Shakespeare’s metre and langua…
They overlapped for 12 years (1835–1846).
When Louise Chandler Moulton was born, William Sidney Walker was about 40.
Louise Chandler Moulton was about 11 when William Sidney Walker died.
About 5,033 km separate
Pomfret, Connecticut, USA from
Pembroke, Wales.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Louise Chandler Moulton:
pomfret connecticut, william upham moulton, this that and the other, may-flowers, bed-time stories, boston literary salon, james mcneill whistler, edmund clarence stedman.
William Sidney Walker:
pembroke, south wales, gustavus vasa, winthrop mackworth praed, john moultrie, trinity college cambridge, craven scholarship, porson prize.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
