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 Wordsworth
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 71%
Poems 89%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the northwestern corner of England, and died on 23 April 1850 at Rydal Mount in the Lake District. Few poets have altered English literary culture so thoroughly. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth helped establish the principles of British Romanticism: a new seriousness about ordinary life, a conviction that emotional experience could be…
“My main endeavour as to style has been that my poems should be written in pure intelligible English.”
In time
Nixon Waterman
William Wordsworth
1770
1944
Their lives did not overlap.
9 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 6,089 km separate Newark, Illinois, USA from Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
William Wordsworth
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 Wordsworth: cockermouth, lake district, samuel taylor coleridge, the prelude, lyrical ballads, annette vallon, the borderers, the ruined cottage.
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
Nixon Waterman
William Wordsworth
Emotional landscapes
Nixon Waterman: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. William Wordsworth: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.