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
Stephen Collins Foster
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 61%
Blended 61%
Swap sides
Another related pair
On a steamy July day in 1864, a man stumbled and fell in his dingy room at the North American Hotel on the Bowery in New York City. When help finally arrived, Stephen Collins Foster lay bleeding, having struck his head on a washbasin. In his pockets, rescuers found a purse containing thirty-eight cents and a scrap of paper bearing the words "dear friends and gentle hearts." Three days later, on January 13, 1864, Fost…
“I have done a great deal to build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refined people by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order.”
In time
James Nack
Stephen Collins Foster
1809
1879
They overlapped for 39 years (1826–1864).
When Stephen Collins Foster was born, James Nack was about 17.
James Nack was about 55 when Stephen Collins Foster died.
On the map
About 569 km separate Schenectady, New York, USA from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Both have ground in New York and New York City.
Stephen Collins Foster
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
antebellum america
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. Stephen Collins Foster: lawrenceville pennsylvania, oh! susanna, my old kentucky home, old folks at home, camptown races, blackface minstrelsy, bellevue hospital, jane denny mcdowell.
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
Stephen Collins Foster
1846
First Published Song
Emotional landscapes
James Nack: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Stephen Collins Foster: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder.