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
Trumbull Stickney
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 74%
Poems 83%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Joseph Trumbull Stickney, known almost always as Trumbull Stickney, was born on 20 June 1874 in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Boston on 11 October 1904. His brief life, ending when he was only thirty, has encouraged the familiar image of the doomed young poet whose promise exceeds his surviving achievement. That image is not wholly wrong, but it is too simple. Stickney was not merely a promising lyricist interrupt…
“There's nothing to get out of life; there are ways to live it.”
In time
James Nack
Trumbull Stickney
1809
1904
They overlapped for 6 years (1874–1879).
When Trumbull Stickney was born, James Nack was about 65.
Trumbull Stickney was about 5 when James Nack died.
On the map
About 6,082 km separate Schenectady, New York, USA from Geneva, Switzerland. Shared ground: United States.
Trumbull Stickney
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
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. Trumbull Stickney: geneva, boston, harvard college, william vaughn moody, george santayana, dramatic lyrics, greek tragedy, american school of classical studies.
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
Trumbull Stickney
1902
Final Years in Paris
Emotional landscapes
James Nack: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Trumbull Stickney: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.