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
Gerald Gould
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 72%
Poems 81%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the landscape of early twentieth-century English poetry, Gerald Gould occupies a curious position—too well-known to have been forgotten entirely, yet too overlooked to claim his rightful place in the literary canon. Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1885 and raised in Norwich, Gould lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, a time when the certainties of the Victorian age gave way to the…
In time
Nixon Waterman
Gerald Gould
1859
1944
They overlapped for 52 years (1885–1936).
When Gerald Gould was born, Nixon Waterman was about 26.
Nixon Waterman was about 77 when Gerald Gould died.
On the map
About 6,280 km separate Newark, Illinois, USA from Scarborough, England. 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. Gerald Gould: norwich, barbara ayrton, georgian poet, lyrics, an essay on the nature of lyric, united suffragists, men's league for women's suffrage, the happy tree and other poems.
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
Gerald Gould
1916
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
Nixon Waterman: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Gerald Gould: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality.