George Sterling was born on 1 December 1869 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, and died on 17 November 1926 in San Francisco, California. During his lifetime he was celebrated, often extravagantly, as the foremost poet of the American Pacific Coast: a writer of redwood groves, desert immensities, sea fog, cosmic fire, erotic dream, and supernatural terror. His reputation later suffered a dramatic eclipse. The rich…
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
George Sterling
Poet B
Madison Julius Cawein
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 74%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Madison Julius Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 23 March 1865, at the unsettled close of the Civil War, and died there on 8 December 1914, not yet fifty years old. During his lifetime he was among the best-known American poets of his generation, a writer praised by influential editors, admired in Britain as well as the United States, and affectionately called the “Keats of Kentucky.” After his death, howev…
In time
George Sterling
Madison Julius Cawein
1865
1926
They overlapped for 46 years (1869–1914).
When George Sterling was born, Madison Julius Cawein was about 4.
George Sterling was about 45 when Madison Julius Cawein died.
On the map
About 1,192 km separate Sag Harbor, New York, USA from Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Madison Julius Cawein
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
imaginative
supernatural
George Sterling: sag harbor, san francisco, the testimony of the suns, a wine of wizardry, ambrose bierce, jack london, bohemian club, california poet. Madison Julius Cawein: louisville, keats of kentucky, blooms of the berry, kentucky poems, edmund clarence stedman, gertrude foster mckelvey, myth and romance, intimations of the beautiful.
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.
George Sterling
Madison Julius Cawein
Emotional landscapes
George Sterling: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness. Madison Julius Cawein: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.