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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Trumbull Stickney
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public intellectual. He was often called the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” after his most celebrated prose…
“There are no graves that grow so green as the graves of children.”
Joseph Trumbull Stickney, known almost always as Trumbull Stickney, was born on 20 June 1874 in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Boston on 11 October 1904. His brief life, ending when he was only thirty, has encouraged the familiar image of the doomed young poet whose promise exceeds his surviving achievement. That image is not wholly wrong, but it is too simple. Stickney was not merely a promising lyricist interrupt…
“There's nothing to get out of life; there are ways to live it.”
About 5,911 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Geneva, Switzerland. Both have ground in Boston and Massachusetts.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: cambridge, massachusetts, boston, old ironsides, the contagiousness of puerperal fever, the autocrat of the breakfast-table, amelia lee jackson, harvard college, hasty pudding club. Trumbull Stickney: geneva, boston, harvard college, william vaughn moody, george santayana, dramatic lyrics, greek tragedy, american school of classical studies.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Trumbull Stickney: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.
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