In the golden age of American newspaper poetry, when verses appeared on editorial pages alongside the day's news and readers clipped favorite stanzas to paste in scrapbooks, few voices resonated more warmly with the reading public than that of Nixon Waterman. Born on November 12, 1859, in the small prairie town of Newark, Illinois, Waterman would rise from humble agricultural beginnings to become one of the most wide…
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
Nixon Waterman
Poet B
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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 70%
Poems 89%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on 5 November 1850 in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, a rural community whose fields, seasons, family routines, and wide horizons remained central to her imaginative life. She died on 30 October 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut, only days before her sixty-ninth birthday. Between those dates she became one of the most widely read poets in the United States. Her name was known in p…
“It is your duty to aid in removing these obstacles and in making the road a safe and clear thoroughfare for all who journey.”
In time
Nixon Waterman
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
1850
1944
They overlapped for 61 years (1859–1919).
When Nixon Waterman was born, Ella Wheeler Wilcox was about 9.
Nixon Waterman was about 60 when Ella Wheeler Wilcox died.
On the map
About 131 km separate Newark, Illinois, USA from Johnstown Center, Wisconsin, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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
popular
newspapers
Nixon Waterman: newark, illinois, creston, iowa, chicago herald, small change, a rose to the living, opinion columns, ben king's verse, some home-made poems. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: johnstown center, short beach, solitude, poems of passion, robert m. wilcox, positive thinking, the voice of the voiceless, women's suffrage.
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.
Nixon Waterman
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Emotional landscapes
Nixon Waterman: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.