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
Nora Hopper Chesson
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
Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…
“Why not, indeed? Wilder fancies may be devised, and stranger things have come to pass.”
In time
Alice Cary
Nora Hopper Chesson
1820
1906
They overlapped for 1 year (1871–1871).
When Nora Hopper Chesson was born, Alice Cary was about 51.
Nora Hopper Chesson was about 0 when Alice Cary died.
On the map
About 6,173 km separate Mount Healthy, Ohio, USA from Exeter, Devon, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Nora Hopper Chesson
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
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. Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival.
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
Nora Hopper Chesson
Emotional landscapes
Alice Cary: Irony, Sorrow, Wonder. Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.