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
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…
“Do all you can for mankind: mankind have established a rule to do nothing for you!”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
They overlapped for 43 years (1803–1845).
When Richard Henry Horne was born, Thomas Hood was about 4.
Richard Henry Horne was about 42 when Thomas Hood died.
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.
Richard Henry Horne:
london, guernsey, royal military college, orion, hecatompylos, elizabeth barrett browning, william howitt, cosmo de' medici.
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.
