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

James Joyce James Joyce

Poet B

Walter de la Mare Walter de la Mare
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 60% Poems 84% Blended 71%
Swap sides Another related pair
James Joyce

James Joyce

2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941 (~59)
24 live poems · English

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…

“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
Walter de la Mare

Walter de la Mare

25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956 (~83)
3 live poems · English

Walter John de la Mare was born on 25 April 1873 at Charlton, then in Kent and now part of southeast London, into a family whose circumstances were modest but whose cultural inheritance was unusually varied. His father, James Edward de la Mare, worked as an official at the Bank of England; his mother, Lucy Sophia Browning, came from a family with Scottish connections. The surname preserved a French Huguenot ancestry,…

“Only the rarest kind of best is good enough for the young.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness

In time

James Joyce
Walter de la Mare
1873 1956
They overlapped for 60 years (1882–1941). When James Joyce was born, Walter de la Mare was about 9. Walter de la Mare was about 68 when James Joyce died.

On the map

About 549 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Canterbury, Kent, 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

James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste. Walter de la Mare: charlton, st paul's cathedral choir school, songs of childhood, the listeners, the three mulla-mulgars, peacock pie, elfrida ingpen, henry newbolt.

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.

Thou leanest to the shell of night
James Joyce
74%
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Old Susan
Walter de la Mare
O, it was out by Donnycarney
James Joyce
74% world
Compare
The Titmouse
Walter de la Mare
Lean out of the window
James Joyce
74% room, book
Compare
Old Susan
Walter de la Mare
Silently she’s combing
James Joyce
73%
Compare
Old Susan
Walter de la Mare
Thou leanest to the shell of night
James Joyce
73%
Compare
The Moth
Walter de la Mare
At that hour when all things have repose
James Joyce
72% world
Compare
The Titmouse
Walter de la Mare

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Walter de la Mare: Wonder, Peace, Tenderness.

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