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.
Owen Seaman
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.
Owen Seaman, born on 18 September 1861 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and dead on 2 February 1936, occupied an unusually influential place in British literary culture for a man whose name is now less familiar than the names of many writers he parodied, edited, or helped to popularize. Poet, humorist, classicist, journalist, critic, lecturer, and long-serving editor of Punch, he was one of the most conspicuous representat…
“A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.”
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…
“I could not call up the images which your poem pictured in words without a thrill of sympathy and an aching of regret.”
About 5,054 km separate Shrewsbury, Shropshire, 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.
Owen Seaman: shrewsbury, punch, edwardian wit, clare college, rossall school, the battle of the bays, in cap and bells, borrowed plumes. 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.
Owen Seaman: Irony, Sorrow, Anger. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.
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