Elizabeth Thomas, who wrote under the name “Corinna,” was born in 1675 and died in 1731. She belongs to that large and fascinating company of early eighteenth-century women writers whose lives survive only in fragments: poems, letters, dedications, hostile anecdotes, printers’ advertisements, and the recollections of men whose literary fame later eclipsed theirs. Yet Thomas was far more than a minor satellite of Alex…
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
Elizabeth Thomas
Poet B
Charlotte Smith
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 78%
Poems 83%
Blended 80%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London on 4 May 1749 and died at Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey, on 28 October 1806. During her lifetime she was known not only as a poet but as one of the most productive and commercially important writers in Britain. She published poetry, novels, children’s books, translations, and educational works while sustaining a large family and enduring a marriage, a debt crisis,…
“The language of the heart is not confined to any particular situation or time.”
In time
Elizabeth Thomas
Charlotte Smith
1675
1806
Their lives did not overlap.
18 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 172 km separate Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, Wales from Stoke next Guildford, Surrey, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Elizabeth Thomas
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
Elizabeth Thomas only
From the biographies
woman
social
history
Elizabeth Thomas: skenfrith, monmouthshire, corinna, richard gwinnett, pylades, alexander pope, miscellany poems on several subjects, eighteenth-century women writers. Charlotte Smith: london, elegiac sonnets, the old manor house, the emigrants, nicholas turner, benjamin smith, french revolution, georgian england.
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
Elizabeth Thomas
Charlotte Smith
1764
First Child Born
Emotional landscapes
Elizabeth Thomas: Despair, Sorrow, Anger. Charlotte Smith: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.