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
Witter Bynner
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 86%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“Whenever possible, I have avoided phraseology which, natural and familiar in Chinese, would be exotic or quaint in English.”
In time
Madison Julius Cawein
Witter Bynner
1865
1968
They overlapped for 34 years (1881–1914).
When Witter Bynner was born, Madison Julius Cawein was about 16.
Witter Bynner was about 33 when Madison Julius Cawein died.
On the map
About 1,049 km separate Louisville, Kentucky, USA from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Madison Julius Cawein
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
landscape
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. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
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
Witter Bynner
Emotional landscapes
Madison Julius Cawein: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.