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
Edward Rowland Sill
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.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 71%
Poems 80%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Edward Rowland Sill was born on 29 April 1841 in Windsor, Connecticut, and died on 27 February 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio. His life was short, frequently unsettled, and shadowed by poor health, yet it produced a body of poetry and prose distinguished by moral seriousness, intellectual candor, and an unusual tenderness toward ordinary human weakness. He belonged to the generation of American writers who came after the fi…
“Let a man write about himself. It's the only fellow he knows anything about.”
In time
Lew R. Sarett
Edward Rowland Sill
1841
1954
Their lives did not overlap.
1 year separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 1,239 km separate Chicago, Illinois, USA from Windsor, Connecticut, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Edward Rowland Sill
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. Edward Rowland Sill: windsor, connecticut, cleveland, ohio, the hermitage and other poems, the venus of milo and other poems, harvard divinity school, mary b. sill, university of california, transcendentalism.
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
Lew R. Sarett
Edward Rowland Sill
1867
First Published Poem
Emotional landscapes
Lew R. Sarett: Anger, Irony, Joy. Edward Rowland Sill: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality.