William Miller Herschell, born 17 November 1873 in Spencer, Indiana, and dead 2 December 1939 in Indianapolis, became one of the best-loved poetic voices of his state. He was not a poet who sought cosmopolitan authority, avant-garde difficulty, or the permanent attention of the national literary establishment. His poems grew instead from railway shops, newspaper offices, creek banks, limestone country, family memory,…
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
W.M. Herschell
Poet B
James Joyce
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 57%
Blended 57%
Swap sides
Another related pair
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…
“It is very consoling to me that you consider me a writer because every time I sit down with a pen in my hand I have to persuade myself and others of the fact.”
In time
W.M. Herschell
James Joyce
1873
1941
They overlapped for 58 years (1882–1939).
When James Joyce was born, W.M. Herschell was about 9.
James Joyce was about 57 when W.M. Herschell died.
On the map
About 6,144 km separate Spencer, Indiana, USA from Dublin, Ireland. 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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
ordinary
W.M. Herschell: spencer, indiana, indianapolis news, songs of the streets and byways, josephine pugh, robert burns, world war i, railroad machinist, blacksmith. James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste.
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.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
W.M. Herschell
James Joyce
Emotional landscapes
W.M. Herschell: Tenderness, Joy, Sorrow. James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.