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.
Richard Henry Horne entered the world in London on the last day of 1802 (though he himself, with characteristic contrariness, sometimes gave the date as New Year's Day 1803), the son of James Horne, a quarter-master in the 61st Regiment of Foot. His father's military postings took the family to Guernsey, where they lived until James Horne's death in 1810 left the boy fatherless at the age of seven or eight. The young…
“The price of the present edition is one farthing, in order to bring it within the reach of the million.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice 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 27 years (1858–1884).
When Sam Walter Foss was born, Richard Henry Horne was about 55.
Sam Walter Foss was about 26 when Richard Henry Horne died.
Richard Henry Horne:
london, guernsey, royal military college, orion, hecatompylos, elizabeth barrett browning, william howitt, cosmo de' medici.
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.
