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.
The Woodberrys—or Woodburys, as various spellings of the name exist—were an old New England family who had immigrated early in the colonial period and established deep roots along Massachusetts's North Shore. Since settlement took hold in Beverly and neighboring seaport towns, the family had been native to this maritime region, and many of Woodberry's forebears were sea captains and sailors. This ancestral connection…
“The poet is the interpreter of the world to men, and the interpreter of men to themselves.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Sam Walter Foss was born on 19 June 1858 in Candia, New Hampshire, a small rural community whose fields, roads, churches, village shops, and close social networks supplied the emotional landscape of much of his later poetry. He died on 26 February 1911 in Somerville, Massachusetts, at the age of fifty-two. Between those dates he became one of the best-known popular poets in the United States, though not one of its mo…
They overlapped for 54 years (1858–1911).
When Sam Walter Foss was born, George Edward Woodberry was about 3.
George Edward Woodberry was about 56 when Sam Walter Foss died.
George Edward Woodberry:
massachusetts, harvard college, edgar allan poe, the north shore watch, the nation, columbia university, comparative literature, philosophy.
Sam Walter Foss:
candia, new hampshire, somerville, massachusetts, back country poems, the house by the side of the road, brown university, phillips exeter academy, gilded age, progressive era.
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.
