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
James Joyce
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 62%
Blended 62%
Swap sides
Another related pair
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…
“It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty.”
In time
Edwin J. Ellis
James Joyce
1848
1941
They overlapped for 35 years (1882–1916).
When James Joyce was born, Edwin J. Ellis was about 34.
James Joyce was about 34 when Edwin J. Ellis died.
On the map
About 463 km separate London, England from Dublin, Ireland. 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
artist
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. James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste.
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
James Joyce
Emotional landscapes
Edwin J. Ellis: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness. James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.