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 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…
“Incomparably the highest and fortunately the least uncommon form of genius is wisdom in the conduct of life.”
William H. A. Moore, born about 1885 and deceased in 1960, belongs to that important but still insufficiently recovered generation of African American poets whose careers connected the literary culture of the late nineteenth century with the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance and its related movements in Chicago, Washington, and other urban centers. His surviving reputation rests on a small body of lyric poetry, sca…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
They overlapped for 12 years (1885–1896).
When William H. A. Moore was born, Coventry Patmore was about 62.
William H. A. Moore was about 11 when Coventry Patmore died.
About 5,643 km separate
Woodford, Essex, England from
New York City, New York, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Coventry Patmore:
woodford, victorian age, the angel in the house, emily augusta andrews, the germ, pre-raphaelite brotherhood, tamerton church tower, dante gabriel rossetti.
William H. A. Moore:
new york city, dusk songs, the crisis, james weldon johnson, harlem renaissance, city college of new york, columbia university, 1919 race riot.
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.
