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
William Butler Yeats
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 70%
Blended 70%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at Sandymount, County Dublin, and died on 28 January 1939 at Menton, France. During the seventy-three years between those dates, he became not merely Ireland’s most internationally celebrated modern poet but one of the major writers in English. Poet, dramatist, essayist, editor, cultural organizer, senator, and tireless architect of literary institutions, Yeats made a car…
“Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions, with all the uncounted flavours of old experience.”
In time
Philip James Bailey
William Butler Yeats
1816
1939
They overlapped for 38 years (1865–1902).
When William Butler Yeats was born, Philip James Bailey was about 49.
William Butler Yeats was about 37 when Philip James Bailey died.
On the map
About 344 km separate Nottingham, England from Dublin, Ireland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Philip James Bailey
William Butler Yeats
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
history
Philip James Bailey: nottingham, thomas bailey, anne reed, universalist theology, romantic poetry, benjamin carpenter, the angel world, the mystic. William Butler Yeats: sandymount, county dublin, menton, maud gonne, the wanderings of oisin, the second coming, sailing to byzantium, abbey theatre.
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
William Butler Yeats
Emotional landscapes
Philip James Bailey: Peace, Joy, Wonder. William Butler Yeats: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.