Stephen Phillips, born on 28 July 1864 and dead at the distressingly early age of fifty-one on 9 December 1915, was one of the most celebrated English poets and verse dramatists of the years around 1900. For a brief but dazzling period, he seemed to many readers and theatre-goers to be the writer most likely to renew English poetic drama after Tennyson and Browning. His plays filled theatres, his poetry was widely re…
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
Stephen Phillips
Poet B
Robert Nichols
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 89%
Blended 81%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…
“They are gathered together because the book affords an opportunity to record appeals which are—save in one or two cases—to scarcely tangible emotions: those emotions which float across the mind like Coleridge's cloud, thin and pale and very high, and are of import to the very few.”
In time
Stephen Phillips
Robert Nichols
1864
1944
They overlapped for 23 years (1893–1915).
When Robert Nichols was born, Stephen Phillips was about 29.
Robert Nichols was about 22 when Stephen Phillips died.
On the map
About 128 km separate Summertown, Oxford, England from Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England. Both have ground in England.
Stephen Phillips
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
Stephen Phillips only
From the biographies
Stephen Phillips: summertown, oxford, cicely chilcott, paolo and francesca, christ in hades, marpessa, trinity college cambridge, verse drama revival. Robert Nichols: shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets.
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.
1895
The X-Ray Discovery
Stephen Phillips
Robert Nichols
Emotional landscapes
Stephen Phillips: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Robert Nichols: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.