Alice Cary was born on 26 April 1820 in Mount Healthy, Ohio, then a small rural community north of Cincinnati, and died in New York City on 12 February 1871. During her lifetime she became one of the most widely read American women poets of the nineteenth century, as well as a successful novelist, sketch writer, editor, lecturer, and literary hostess. Her name was once familiar in households that memorized poems, san…
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
Alice Cary
Poet B
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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 74%
Poems 85%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…
“I believe in the power of thought to shape character and destiny.”
In time
Alice Cary
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
1820
1919
They overlapped for 22 years (1850–1871).
When Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born, Alice Cary was about 30.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was about 21 when Alice Cary died.
On the map
About 527 km separate Mount Healthy, Ohio, USA from Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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
women
social
Alice Cary: mount healthy, new york city, phoebe cary, the female poets of america, poems of alice and phoebe cary, clovernook, hagar: a story of to-day, nearer home. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: johnstown center, short beach, solitude, poems of passion, robert m. wilcox, positive thinking, the voice of the voiceless, women's suffrage.
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.
Alice Cary
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Emotional landscapes
Alice Cary: Irony, Sorrow, Wonder. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.