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
Jonathan Swift
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.
Somewhat related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 54%
Blended 54%
Swap sides
Another related pair
The life of Jonathan Swift presents one of literature's most fascinating paradoxes: a clergyman who wrote with brutal satirical force, an Irishman who felt himself English, a conservative who championed the oppressed, and a misanthrope whose fury arose from disappointed idealism. Born into poverty and obscurity, Swift became one of the most powerful prose writers in the English language, creating works that continue…
“Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.”
In time
Elizabeth Thomas
Jonathan Swift
1667
1745
They overlapped for 57 years (1675–1731).
When Elizabeth Thomas was born, Jonathan Swift was about 8.
Jonathan Swift was about 64 when Elizabeth Thomas died.
On the map
About 286 km separate Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, Wales from Dublin, Ireland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Elizabeth Thomas
Jonathan Swift
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
Jonathan Swift only
From the biographies
Elizabeth Thomas: skenfrith, monmouthshire, corinna, richard gwinnett, pylades, alexander pope, miscellany poems on several subjects, eighteenth-century women writers. Jonathan Swift: gulliver's travels, a modest proposal, the drapier's letters, esther johnson, william temple, the examiner, robert harley, henry st. john.
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.
1694
Matsuo Bashō dies
Elizabeth Thomas
Jonathan Swift
Emotional landscapes
Elizabeth Thomas: Despair, Sorrow, Anger. Jonathan Swift: Irony, Joy, Fear.