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
Charlotte Smith
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 76%
Poems 83%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London on 4 May 1749 and died at Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey, on 28 October 1806. During her lifetime she was known not only as a poet but as one of the most productive and commercially important writers in Britain. She published poetry, novels, children’s books, translations, and educational works while sustaining a large family and enduring a marriage, a debt crisis,…
“The indulgence with which the public has received these poems has encouraged the author to offer them again.”
In time
Alice Cary
Charlotte Smith
1749
1871
Their lives did not overlap.
14 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 6,345 km separate Mount Healthy, Ohio, USA from Stoke next Guildford, Surrey, 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
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. Charlotte Smith: london, elegiac sonnets, the old manor house, the emigrants, nicholas turner, benjamin smith, french revolution, georgian england.
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
Alice Cary
Charlotte Smith
1764
First Child Born
Emotional landscapes
Alice Cary: Irony, Sorrow, Wonder. Charlotte Smith: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.