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

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

Poet B

Myra Viola Wilds Myra Viola Wilds
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 74% Poems 82% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall

14 September 1883 – 22 April 1922 (~39)
2 live poems · English

Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall was born on 14 September 1883 at Gunnersbury, then in Middlesex, England, and died on 22 April 1922 in Vancouver, British Columbia. During her lifetime she was among the best-known and most admired poets in Canada, a writer whose delicately fashioned lyrics, religious imagination, and exact attention to the natural world won readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her posthumous reput…

“Being a poet in the present state of the market is like saying How is your hare-lip today?”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder
Myra Viola Wilds

Myra Viola Wilds

c. 1880 – c. 1935 (~55)
2 live poems · English

Myra Viola Wilds, born about 1880 and believed to have died about 1935, occupies an unusual and moving place in the history of American poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a single small book, Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915, yet the modest scale of that achievement should not obscure its significance. Wilds was a Kentucky-born poet, a dressmaker, a woman with limited formal education, and…

“Every line and verse in this little volume has been composed and written with my own hand notwithstanding the loss of my eyesight.”

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality

In time

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
Myra Viola Wilds
1880 1935
They overlapped for 40 years (1883–1922). When Marjorie L. C. Pickthall was born, Myra Viola Wilds was about 3. Myra Viola Wilds was about 42 when Marjorie L. C. Pickthall died.

On the map

About 6,408 km separate Gunnersbury, Middlesex, England from Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA. 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

women

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: gunnersbury, vancouver, two ears of corn, the drift of pinions, charles g. d. roberts, canadian poets, victorian aestheticism, catholic church. Myra Viola Wilds: mount ollie, kentucky, thoughts of idle hours, blindness, dressmaker, 1915 publication, sunshine, limited education.

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.

I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
76% life, love
Compare
Dewdrops
Myra Viola Wilds
I Sat Among the Green Leaves
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
72% life, love
Compare
Thoughts
Myra Viola Wilds
The Sea Witch
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
68% life
Compare
Thoughts
Myra Viola Wilds
The Sea Witch
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall
68% life
Compare
Dewdrops
Myra Viola Wilds

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder. Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality.

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