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.
Ebenezer Jones was born in Islington, then a northern suburb of London, on 20 January 1820, and died in London on 14 September 1860, only forty years old. During his lifetime he was almost wholly unknown as a poet, and for decades after his death his name survived chiefly as a curiosity in bibliographies and among a small number of readers with a taste for neglected Victorian oddities. Yet his reputation gradually al…
In the shadowed legacy of America's post-Reconstruction South, where the ghosts of slavery still whispered through cotton fields and river mists, Edward Smyth Jones emerged as a voice of quiet defiance and luminous hope. Born in March 1881 in Natchez, Mississippi, to Hawk and Rebecca Jones—parents who had known the brutal chains of enslavement before emancipation—Jones inherited a world of profound limitation and bou…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Social Justice Poets
About 7,401 km separate
Islington, London, England from
Natchez, Mississippi, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Ebenezer Jones:
islington, studies of sensation and event, victorian poetry, percy bysshe shelley, john keats, robert browning, chartism, commercial realities.
Edward Smyth Jones:
natchez, mississippi, harvard university, the rose that bloometh in my heart, invincible ned, paul laurence dunbar, the sylvan cabin, clement g. morgan, william stanley braithwaite.
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.