Lew R. Sarett, the poet of the wilderness, was born Lewis Zaratzsky—later Saretsky—on May 16, 1888, in the crowded immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago, Illinois. His parents, Rudolph Zaratzsky, a clothing cutter from Poland, and Jeanette Bloch from Lithuania, had arrived in America seeking opportunity amid the waves of Eastern European migration. As their only child, young Lew grew up in a household shaped by both the…
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
Lew R. Sarett
Poet B
Arthur Symons
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 54%
Poems 82%
Blended 67%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Arthur Symons was born on 28 February 1865 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, into a household shaped by religious discipline, frequent movement, and intellectual aspiration. He was the son of the Reverend Arthur Symons, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Mary Ann Symons. His father’s ministry required the family to move from place to place, and the boy’s childhood was therefore less rooted in one local communit…
“Symbolism, in literature, is the expression of the unseen by means of the visible.”
In time
Lew R. Sarett
Arthur Symons
1865
1954
They overlapped for 58 years (1888–1945).
When Lew R. Sarett was born, Arthur Symons was about 23.
Lew R. Sarett was about 57 when Arthur Symons died.
On the map
About 6,039 km separate Chicago, Illinois, USA from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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
Lew R. Sarett only
From the biographies
Lew R. Sarett: chicago, marquette, benton harbor, university of michigan, beloit college, harvard law school, many many moons, the box of god. Arthur Symons: milford haven, wales, reverend arthur symons, days and nights, silhouettes, london literary life, rhymers' club, w. b. yeats.
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.
Lew R. Sarett
Arthur Symons
Emotional landscapes
Lew R. Sarett: Anger, Irony, Joy. Arthur Symons: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.