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
Sadakichi Hartmann
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 66%
Blended 66%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…
“All great art expressions are extractions, typifications, symbolizations of general laws and apparitions.”
In time
Edwin J. Ellis
Sadakichi Hartmann
1848
1944
They overlapped for 50 years (1867–1916).
When Sadakichi Hartmann was born, Edwin J. Ellis was about 19.
Sadakichi Hartmann was about 49 when Edwin J. Ellis died.
On the map
About 9,454 km separate London, England from Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Edwin J. Ellis
Sadakichi Hartmann
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. Sadakichi Hartmann: dejima, nagasaki harbor, walt whitman, whitman society, christ: a dramatic poem, buddha, confucius, mohammed.
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
Emotional landscapes
Edwin J. Ellis: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness. Sadakichi Hartmann: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing.