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
William Soutar
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 66%
Poems 84%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In a modest house on Wilson Street in Perth, Scotland, a small attic room served as both prison and sanctuary for one of Scotland's most remarkable twentieth-century poets. From this confined space, William Soutar would pen some of the most enduring children's verse in Scots literature while simultaneously crafting deeply personal meditations on mortality, isolation, and the human condition. His story is one of extra…
“Though the desire for women troubles the body and the mind, I am yet glad that desire is still so alive in me, for its death would be ominous of creative moribundity.”
In time
Lew R. Sarett
William Soutar
1888
1954
They overlapped for 46 years (1898–1943).
When William Soutar was born, Lew R. Sarett was about 10.
Lew R. Sarett was about 55 when William Soutar died.
On the map
About 5,927 km separate Chicago, Illinois, USA from Perth, Scotland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
William Soutar
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
Lew R. Sarett: chicago, marquette, benton harbor, university of michigan, beloit college, harvard law school, many many moons, the box of god. William Soutar: perth, john soutar, margaret soutar, hms pegasus, ankylosing spondylitis, edinburgh university, scottish renaissance, hugh macdiarmid.
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
William Soutar
1925
First Published Work
Emotional landscapes
Lew R. Sarett: Anger, Irony, Joy. William Soutar: Wonder, Spirituality, Peace.