Compare Poets

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.

Poet A

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

Poet B

Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson
Compare two related contemporaries

A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 75% Poems 87% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

14 September 1883 – 22 April 1922 (~39)
2 live poems · English

Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall was born on 14 September 1883 at Gunnersbury, then in Middlesex, England, and died on 22 April 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia. During her lifetime she was among the best-known and most admired poets in Canada, a writer whose delicately fashioned lyrics, religious imagination, and exact attention to the natural world won readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her posthumous reput…

“Emotions with a foreknowledge of impermanence, a daring mind with only the tongue as outlet, a greed for experience plus a slavery to convention — what the deuce are you to make of that? As a man, you could go ahead and stir things up fine.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder
Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

10 December 1830 – 15 May 1886 (~56)
185 live poems · English

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died there on 15 May 1886. During her lifetime she was known, if at all beyond her immediate circle, as the daughter of a prominent local family, an unusually lively correspondent, a gardener, and eventually a woman who lived with increasing privacy. After her death, she emerged as one of the most startling and essential poets in th…

“Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing

In time

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
Emily Dickinson
1830 1922
They overlapped for 4 years (1883–1886). When Marjorie L. C. Pickthall was born, Emily Dickinson was about 53. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall was about 3 when Emily Dickinson died.

On the map

About 5,350 km separate Gunnersbury, Middlesex, England from Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

Shared

From the biographies

religious

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: gunnersbury, vancouver, two ears of corn, the drift of pinions, charles g. d. roberts, canadian poets, victorian aestheticism, catholic church. Emily Dickinson: amherst, massachusetts, edward dickinson, susan gilbert, because i could not stop for death, fascicles, mount holyoke female seminary, civil war.

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.

I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
83%
Compare
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise
Emily Dickinson
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
80% life
Compare
So bashful when I spied her
Emily Dickinson
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
79% life
Compare
New feet within my garden go
Emily Dickinson
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
79%
Compare
This is my letter to the world
Emily Dickinson
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
78%
Compare
Come slowly—Eden!
Emily Dickinson
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
78%
Compare
Hope is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder. Emily Dickinson: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.

Skip to main content