In the golden age of American newspaper poetry, when verses appeared on editorial pages alongside the day's news and readers clipped favorite stanzas to paste in scrapbooks, few voices resonated more warmly with the reading public than that of Nixon Waterman. Born on November 12, 1859, in the small prairie town of Newark, Illinois, Waterman would rise from humble agricultural beginnings to become one of the most wide…
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
Nixon Waterman
Poet B
William Allingham
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 67%
Blended 67%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Allingham was born on 19 March 1824 in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, a small market town at the mouth of the River Erne, and died on 18 November 1889 at Hampstead in London. His literary reputation rests above all on a handful of extraordinarily durable lyrics: poems of rivers, birds, childhood, fairy lore, village life, and remembered Irish landscapes. Yet his career was broader and more complicated than the…
“I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in the machinery of civilized life?”
In time
Nixon Waterman
William Allingham
1824
1944
They overlapped for 31 years (1859–1889).
When Nixon Waterman was born, William Allingham was about 35.
Nixon Waterman was about 30 when William Allingham died.
On the map
About 5,808 km separate Newark, Illinois, USA from Ballyshannon, County Donegal, 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.
Shared
From the biographies
Nixon Waterman: newark, illinois, creston, iowa, chicago herald, small change, a rose to the living, opinion columns, ben king's verse, some home-made poems. William Allingham: ballyshannon, county donegal, the faeries, laurence bloomfield in ireland, the winding banks of erne, victorian britain, pre-raphaelite circle, dante gabriel rossetti.
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.
Nixon Waterman
William Allingham
Emotional landscapes
Nixon Waterman: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. William Allingham: Wonder, Sorrow, Fear.