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.
Coventry Patmore
Barry Cornwall
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore was born on 23 July 1823 at Woodford, then a village in Essex on the eastern edge of London, and died on 26 November 1896 at Lymington in Hampshire. During his lifetime he became one of the most distinctive, admired, mocked, and misunderstood English poets of the Victorian age. His reputation rests above all on The Angel in the House, a long poetic sequence whose title became inseparab…
“Men would never offend God, if they knew how ready He is to forgive them.”
Bryan Waller Procter, known to generations of readers by the literary name Barry Cornwall, was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 21 November 1787, and died in London on 5 October 1874. He belonged to that broad, fascinating company of early nineteenth-century writers who stood close to the great Romantic generation without ever wholly entering its innermost circle. He was not a poet of Byron’s volcanic self-dramatization,…
“Your thoughts, which have hitherto been obscured by boyish things, become refined; your sight opens and admits wider sights and more gentle objects.”
About 285 km separate Woodford, Essex, England from Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Coventry Patmore: woodford, victorian age, the angel in the house, emily augusta andrews, the germ, pre-raphaelite brotherhood, tamerton church tower, dante gabriel rossetti. Barry Cornwall: leeds, charles lamb, adelaide anne procter, dramatic scenes and other poems, the life of edmund kean, english songs, the sea, touch us gently, time!.
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.
Coventry Patmore: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness. Barry Cornwall: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.
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