James Nack, born 4 January 1809 and dead on 23 September 1879, occupies a curious and important place in the literary history of the United States. He was a poet whose reputation, during the most active years of his career, rested as much upon the apparent improbability of his achievement as upon the verse itself. Nack was deaf, and nineteenth-century readers repeatedly treated that fact as the central explanation fo…
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
James Nack
Poet B
Alphonse de Lamartine
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 60%
Poems 79%
Blended 68%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Alphonse de Lamartine was born on 21 October 1790 in Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and died in Paris on 1 March 1869. Poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, parliamentarian, and revolutionary statesman, he lived at the point where literary Romanticism and modern French political life came into being. Few writers have more completely embodied the nineteenth-century belief that eloquence might be a pub…
“I was the first to bring poetry down from Parnassus and to give what was called the Muse, instead of a conventional seven-stringed lyre, the very fibres of the human heart, touched and moved by the innumerable thrills of the soul and of nature.”
In time
James Nack
Alphonse de Lamartine
1790
1879
They overlapped for 61 years (1809–1869).
When James Nack was born, Alphonse de Lamartine was about 19.
James Nack was about 60 when Alphonse de Lamartine died.
On the map
About 5,986 km separate Schenectady, New York, USA from Mâcon, Burgundy, France. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Alphonse de Lamartine
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
James Nack: new york city, the legend of the rocks, deaf and dumb, new york institution for the deaf and dumb, american romanticism, nineteenth-century poetry, antebellum america, landscape poetry. Alphonse de Lamartine: mâcon, burgundy, le lac, méditations poétiques, julie charles, voyage en orient, mary ann birch, romanticism.
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.
James Nack
1879
Death of James Nack
Alphonse de Lamartine
Emotional landscapes
James Nack: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Alphonse de Lamartine: Longing, Wonder, Sensuality.