Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who wrote under the enduringly cheerful name Susan Coolidge, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 29 January 1835, and died in Newport, Rhode Island, on 9 April 1905. She occupies a central place in the history of American children’s literature, though her reputation has often rested too narrowly on a single title: What Katy Did (1872). That novel and its sequels made her one of the best-known writ…
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
Susan Coolidge
Poet B
John Drinkwater
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 44%
Poems 88%
Blended 64%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…
“It enquires into the impulse that moves the poet to creation and describes, as far as individual limitations will allow, the way in which the poet’s work impresses the world.”
In time
Susan Coolidge
John Drinkwater
1835
1937
They overlapped for 24 years (1882–1905).
When John Drinkwater was born, Susan Coolidge was about 47.
John Drinkwater was about 23 when Susan Coolidge died.
On the map
About 6,017 km separate Cleveland, Ohio, USA from Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex. 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
Susan Coolidge only
From the biographies
Susan Coolidge: cleveland, newport, what katy did, katy carr, victorian domestic fiction, civil war nurse, theodore dwight woolsey, eyebright. John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander.
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.
Susan Coolidge
1876
Travel to Europe
John Drinkwater
1908
First Published Work
Emotional landscapes
Susan Coolidge: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.