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

Sadakichi Hartmann Sadakichi Hartmann

Poet B

James Elroy Flecker James Elroy Flecker
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 82% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sadakichi Hartmann

Sadakichi Hartmann

8 November 1867 – 22 November 1944 (~77)
2 live poems · English

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…

“I wrote the first generally accepted History of American Art—it is not likely that an alien enemy would devote ten years of his life to such a task.”

Neighbourhood: Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
James Elroy Flecker

James Elroy Flecker

5 November 1884 – 3 January 1915 (~31)
2 live poems · English

The story of James Elroy Flecker is one of brilliant promise cut tragically short, of a poet who sought to recapture the lush exoticism and sensuous beauty of the Romantics in an age growing increasingly modernist and austere. Born Herman Elroy Flecker on November 5, 1884, in Lewisham, London, he would live only thirty years before tuberculosis claimed him, yet in that brief span he created a body of work that contin…

“It is not the poet's business to save man's soul, but to make it worth saving.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Love Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Sadakichi Hartmann
James Elroy Flecker
1867 1944
They overlapped for 32 years (1884–1915). When James Elroy Flecker was born, Sadakichi Hartmann was about 17. Sadakichi Hartmann was about 48 when James Elroy Flecker died.

On the map

About 9,452 km separate Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan from Deptford, London, England. 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

From the biographies

Sadakichi Hartmann: dejima, nagasaki harbor, walt whitman, whitman society, christ: a dramatic poem, buddha, confucius, mohammed. James Elroy Flecker: lewisham, tuberculosis, the bridge of fire, thirty-six poems, the golden journey to samarkand, hassan, hellé skiadaressi, parnassian.

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.

Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
78%
Compare
Pavlovna in London
James Elroy Flecker
Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
76% world
Compare
The Old Ships
James Elroy Flecker
Tanka I
Sadakichi Hartmann
74%
Compare
Pavlovna in London
James Elroy Flecker
Tanka I
Sadakichi Hartmann
69%
Compare
The Old Ships
James Elroy Flecker

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Sadakichi Hartmann: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing. James Elroy Flecker: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

Skip to main content