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
Alice Cary
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 66%
Poems 85%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
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…
In time
Susan Coolidge
Alice Cary
1820
1905
They overlapped for 37 years (1835–1871).
When Susan Coolidge was born, Alice Cary was about 15.
Susan Coolidge was about 36 when Alice Cary died.
On the map
About 349 km separate Cleveland, Ohio, USA from Mount Healthy, Ohio, USA. Both have ground in Ohio.
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
domestic
women
social
Susan Coolidge: cleveland, newport, what katy did, katy carr, victorian domestic fiction, civil war nurse, theodore dwight woolsey, eyebright. 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.
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
Alice Cary
Emotional landscapes
Susan Coolidge: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. Alice Cary: Irony, Sorrow, Wonder.