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
Samuel Johnson
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 59%
Poems 74%
Blended 66%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Samuel Johnson stands as one of the most imposing and fascinating figures in the history of English literature, a man whose physical bulk was matched only by the magnitude of his intellectual achievements and the breadth of his influence on the language itself. Born on September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, and dying in London on December 13, 1784, Johnson's seventy-five years encompassed a journey from pro…
“A man may hate his king, yet not love his country.”
In time
Elizabeth Thomas
Samuel Johnson
1675
1784
They overlapped for 23 years (1709–1731).
When Samuel Johnson was born, Elizabeth Thomas was about 34.
Samuel Johnson was about 22 when Elizabeth Thomas died.
On the map
About 111 km separate Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, Wales from Lichfield, Staffordshire, 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
Elizabeth Thomas: skenfrith, monmouthshire, corinna, richard gwinnett, pylades, alexander pope, miscellany poems on several subjects, eighteenth-century women writers. Samuel Johnson: lichfield, staffordshire, queen anne, elizabeth porter, the vanity of human wishes, a dictionary of the english language, the rambler, the idler.
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.
Elizabeth Thomas
Samuel Johnson
Emotional landscapes
Elizabeth Thomas: Despair, Sorrow, Anger. Samuel Johnson: Irony, Sorrow, Despair.