Grace Hazard Conkling, born Grace Walcott Hazard in New York City on 7 February 1878, belonged to a generation of American women whose intellectual ambitions were increasingly supported by women’s colleges, international study, and new professional opportunities, even as marriage and motherhood still imposed demanding social expectations. She became a poet, teacher, musician, critic of children’s reading, and a forma…
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
Grace Hazard Conkling
Poet B
John Davidson
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.
Somewhat related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 54%
Blended 54%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Davidson was born on 11 April 1857 in Barrhead, Renfrewshire, and died on 23 March 1909, or shortly thereafter, in the waters off Penzance, Cornwall. He was a Scottish poet, playwright, novelist, critic, journalist, and tireless literary experimenter whose work stands at a crucial threshold in British writing. In temperament and technique, he belonged neither wholly to the late Victorians nor wholly to the moder…
“A poet is always a man of inordinate ambition and of inordinate vanity. In his heart he says, I want my poetry to be remembered when Homer and Dante and Shakespeare are forgotten.”
In time
Grace Hazard Conkling
John Davidson
1857
1958
They overlapped for 32 years (1878–1909).
When Grace Hazard Conkling was born, John Davidson was about 21.
Grace Hazard Conkling was about 31 when John Davidson died.
On the map
About 5,172 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Paisley, Scotland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Grace Hazard Conkling
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
Grace Hazard Conkling: new york city, smith college, hilda conkling, symphony of a mexican garden, wilderness songs, roscoe platt conkling, tampico, charles-marie widor. John Davidson: barrhead, renfrewshire, penzance, alexander davidson, margaret mcarthur, in a music hall and other poems, fleet street eclogues, thirty bob a week.
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.
Grace Hazard Conkling
1900
Study in Europe
John Davidson
Emotional landscapes
Grace Hazard Conkling: Sensuality, Wonder, Longing. John Davidson: Spirituality, Wonder, Anger.