Stephen Phillips, born on 28 July 1864 and dead at the distressingly early age of fifty-one on 9 December 1915, was one of the most celebrated English poets and verse dramatists of the years around 1900. For a brief but dazzling period, he seemed to many readers and theatre-goers to be the writer most likely to renew English poetic drama after Tennyson and Browning. His plays filled theatres, his poetry was widely re…
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
Stephen Phillips
Poet B
Howard Phelps Putnam
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 75%
Poems 83%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Howard Phelps Putnam was born in 1894 in Allston, Massachusetts, then a distinctly suburban and semi-rural part of Boston, and died on July 3, 1948, in Jamaica Plain. He belonged to the generation of American writers formed between the confident cultural inheritance of the nineteenth century and the disillusioning modernity of the First World War. His reputation never became as large as those of several Yale contempo…
In time
Stephen Phillips
Howard Phelps Putnam
1864
1948
They overlapped for 22 years (1894–1915).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, Stephen Phillips was about 30.
Howard Phelps Putnam was about 21 when Stephen Phillips died.
On the map
About 5,180 km separate Summertown, Oxford, England from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Stephen Phillips
Howard Phelps Putnam
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
Stephen Phillips only
From the biographies
gave
Stephen Phillips: summertown, oxford, cicely chilcott, paolo and francesca, christ in hades, marpessa, trinity college cambridge, verse drama revival. Howard Phelps Putnam: allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét.
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.
1895
The X-Ray Discovery
Stephen Phillips
Howard Phelps Putnam
Emotional landscapes
Stephen Phillips: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear.