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
Nora Hopper Chesson
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 75%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…
“Nor need we doubt that the lucky man is he who is born on Christmas Day.”
In time
Grace Hazard Conkling
Nora Hopper Chesson
1871
1958
They overlapped for 29 years (1878–1906).
When Grace Hazard Conkling was born, Nora Hopper Chesson was about 7.
Grace Hazard Conkling was about 28 when Nora Hopper Chesson died.
On the map
About 5,370 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Exeter, Devon, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Grace Hazard Conkling
Nora Hopper Chesson
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
Grace Hazard Conkling: new york city, smith college, hilda conkling, symphony of a mexican garden, wilderness songs, roscoe platt conkling, tampico, charles-marie widor. Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival.
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
Nora Hopper Chesson
Emotional landscapes
Grace Hazard Conkling: Sensuality, Wonder, Longing. Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.