Katherine Philips, born Katherine Fowler on 1 January 1632 and dead at only thirty-two on 22 June 1664, achieved a distinction that would have seemed improbable in the unsettled England of her youth: she became a celebrated poet while she was still alive, and she did so as a woman writing in forms and subjects conventionally claimed by men. Known to her readers and friends as “Orinda,” Philips fashioned poems of frie…
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
Katherine Philips
Poet B
Emily Dickinson
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 71%
Poems 86%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died there on 15 May 1886. During her lifetime she was known, if at all beyond her immediate circle, as the daughter of a prominent local family, an unusually lively correspondent, a gardener, and eventually a woman who lived with increasing privacy. After her death, she emerged as one of the most startling and essential poets in th…
“Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”
In time
Katherine Philips
Emily Dickinson
1632
1886
Their lives did not overlap.
166 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 5,359 km separate London, England from Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Katherine Philips
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
Katherine Philips only
From the biographies
Katherine Philips: orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars. Emily Dickinson: amherst, massachusetts, edward dickinson, susan gilbert, because i could not stop for death, fascicles, mount holyoke female seminary, civil war.
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
Katherine Philips
Emily Dickinson
Emotional landscapes
Katherine Philips: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. Emily Dickinson: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.