Philip James Bailey was born in Nottingham on 22 April 1816 and died there on 6 September 1902, after a long life in which one early work made him, for a time, one of the most discussed poets in the English-speaking world. His name is now chiefly attached to Festus, the immense dramatic poem first published in 1839, but Bailey’s career was more than the history of a single Victorian bestseller. It was the history of…
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
Philip James Bailey
Poet B
Hilda Doolittle
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 60%
Blended 60%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Hilda Doolittle, who published almost all her work as H.D., was born on 10 September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and died on 27 September 1961 in Zürich, Switzerland. Few modern writers have so thoroughly transformed apparent limitation into artistic amplitude. The initials by which she became famous could seem austere, even impersonal: a pair of letters fit for the clean, compressed poems associated with Imagis…
“Vision is of two kinds—vision of the womb and vision of the brain.”
In time
Philip James Bailey
Hilda Doolittle
1816
1961
They overlapped for 17 years (1886–1902).
When Hilda Doolittle was born, Philip James Bailey was about 70.
Hilda Doolittle was about 16 when Philip James Bailey died.
On the map
About 5,551 km separate Nottingham, England from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Philip James Bailey
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
Philip James Bailey: nottingham, thomas bailey, anne reed, universalist theology, romantic poetry, benjamin carpenter, the angel world, the mystic. Hilda Doolittle: bethlehem, pennsylvania, ezra pound, imagism, sea garden, ocean imagery, greek mythology, richard aldington, bryn mawr college.
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.
Philip James Bailey
1840
Called to the Bar
Hilda Doolittle
Emotional landscapes
Philip James Bailey: Peace, Joy, Wonder. Hilda Doolittle: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.