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.
Thomas Hood was born in London on 23 May 1799 and died there on 3 May 1845, only twenty days short of his forty-sixth birthday. He occupies a distinctive, sometimes deceptively difficult place in English literary history. To generations of readers he has been the author of jokes, puns, comic ballads, and apparently effortless verbal absurdities; to others he is the compassionate author of “The Song of the Shirt” and…
“I have never had a day's health in my life, but I have had several days of illness.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets
In the heart of nineteenth-century American letters stands a figure who defied easy categorization, a man who straddled two seemingly incompatible worlds with remarkable grace. Edmund Clarence Stedman, born on October 8, 1833, in Hartford, Connecticut, would become known as the "Bard of Wall Street," a sobriquet that captured both the paradox and the peculiar achievement of his life. For forty-five years, he navigate…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
They overlapped for 13 years (1833–1845).
When Edmund Clarence Stedman was born, Thomas Hood was about 34.
Edmund Clarence Stedman was about 12 when Thomas Hood died.
About 5,413 km separate
The Poultry, Cheapside, London from
Hartford, Connecticut, USA.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Thomas Hood:
london, the song of the shirt, the bridge of sighs, j. h. reynolds, whims and oddities, the dream of eugene aram, faithless sally brown, the plea of the midsummer fairies.
Edmund Clarence Stedman:
hartford, bard of wall street, elizabeth clementine stedman, new york city, the norwich tribune, how old brown took harper's ferry, pan in wall street, yale university.
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.
