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.
Joanna Baillie
Nora Hopper Chesson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Joanna Baillie was born on 11 September 1762 at the manse of Bothwell, near Hamilton in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and died on 23 February 1851 at Hampstead, then a village on the northern edge of London. During her exceptionally long life, she became one of the most admired British writers of the Romantic period: a poet of acute observation, an ambitious theorist of the emotions, a dramatist who sought to renew tragedy…
“The mind of man is the great object of dramatic imitation.”
Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…
“The Danish custom proclaims the Julafred or Yule Peace, and punishes any breach of it by a heavy fine.”
About 566 km separate Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland from Exeter, Devon, England. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Joanna Baillie: bothwell, lanarkshire, james baillie, dorothea hunter baillie, william hunter, a series of plays, de monfort, the witchcraft. Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Joanna Baillie: Tenderness, Joy, Longing. Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.
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