Edwin John Ellis, born in London on 20 May 1848 and dead in 1916, belongs to that large but consequential company of late-Victorian writers whose names have faded while the movements, friendships, and acts of interpretation in which they participated remain central to literary history. He was a poet, painter, critic, editor, and imaginative theorist: a figure drawn to symbolism, myth, spiritual aspiration, and the af…
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
Edwin J. Ellis
Poet B
Susan Coolidge
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.
Somewhat related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 43%
Blended 43%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who wrote under the enduringly cheerful name Susan Coolidge, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 29 January 1835, and died in Newport, Rhode Island, on 9 April 1905. She occupies a central place in the history of American children’s literature, though her reputation has often rested too narrowly on a single title: What Katy Did (1872). That novel and its sequels made her one of the best-known writ…
“Everything in the world has two handles. One is a smooth handle. If you take hold of it, the thing comes up lightly and easily, but if you seize the rough handle, it hurts your hand and the thing is hard to lift.”
In time
Edwin J. Ellis
Susan Coolidge
1835
1916
They overlapped for 58 years (1848–1905).
When Edwin J. Ellis was born, Susan Coolidge was about 13.
Edwin J. Ellis was about 57 when Susan Coolidge died.
On the map
About 6,011 km separate London, England from Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Edwin J. Ellis
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
Edwin J. Ellis: london, w. b. yeats, william blake, the works of william blake, seen in three days, fate in arcadia, pre-raphaelite movement, celtic revival. Susan Coolidge: cleveland, newport, what katy did, katy carr, victorian domestic fiction, civil war nurse, theodore dwight woolsey, eyebright.
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.
Edwin J. Ellis
Susan Coolidge
1876
Travel to Europe
Emotional landscapes
Edwin J. Ellis: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness. Susan Coolidge: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.