Madison Julius Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 23 March 1865, at the unsettled close of the Civil War, and died there on 8 December 1914, not yet fifty years old. During his lifetime he was among the best-known American poets of his generation, a writer praised by influential editors, admired in Britain as well as the United States, and affectionately called the “Keats of Kentucky.” After his death, howev…
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
Madison Julius Cawein
Poet B
Alphonse de Lamartine
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 63%
Blended 63%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Alphonse de Lamartine was born on 21 October 1790 in Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and died in Paris on 1 March 1869. Poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, parliamentarian, and revolutionary statesman, he lived at the point where literary Romanticism and modern French political life came into being. Few writers have more completely embodied the nineteenth-century belief that eloquence might be a pub…
“La poésie est l'incarnation de la pensée humaine dans le langage humain.”
In time
Madison Julius Cawein
Alphonse de Lamartine
1790
1914
They overlapped for 5 years (1865–1869).
When Madison Julius Cawein was born, Alphonse de Lamartine was about 75.
Madison Julius Cawein was about 4 when Alphonse de Lamartine died.
On the map
About 7,090 km separate Louisville, Kentucky, USA from Mâcon, Burgundy, France. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Madison Julius Cawein
Alphonse de Lamartine
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
Madison Julius Cawein only
From the biographies
Madison Julius Cawein: louisville, keats of kentucky, blooms of the berry, kentucky poems, edmund clarence stedman, gertrude foster mckelvey, myth and romance, intimations of the beautiful. Alphonse de Lamartine: mâcon, burgundy, le lac, méditations poétiques, julie charles, voyage en orient, mary ann birch, romanticism.
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.
Madison Julius Cawein
Alphonse de Lamartine
Emotional landscapes
Madison Julius Cawein: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Alphonse de Lamartine: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.