Helen Hoyt, born on 22 January 1887 in Norwalk, Connecticut, and dead on 2 August 1972, belonged to the generation of American poets that came of age just as literary modernism was remaking the possibilities of verse. She was a poet, editor, anthologist, and perceptive advocate for new writing, yet her name has often remained at the edges of accounts dominated by more famous contemporaries. That relative obscurity ca…
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
Helen Hoyt
Poet B
Alice Corbin
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
Alice Corbin Henderson, born Alice Corbin on 16 April 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, and dead on 18 July 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupies an important if still insufficiently celebrated place in American literary history. She was a poet of lyrical concentration, an editor whose judgment helped define a revolutionary period in verse, a critic attentive to the relation between art and place, and a cultural organize…
“There you have the deep personal experience and revelation which is the only sort of propaganda, and one might say of poetry, that counts.”
In time
Helen Hoyt
Alice Corbin
1881
1972
They overlapped for 63 years (1887–1949).
When Helen Hoyt was born, Alice Corbin was about 6.
Helen Hoyt was about 62 when Alice Corbin died.
On the map
About 1,456 km separate Norwalk, Connecticut, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Both have ground in St. Louis and Missouri.
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
imagism
editor
editorial
helped
Helen Hoyt: norwalk, connecticut, barnard college, poems of amis, the name of a rose, others for 1919, harriet monroe, william carlos williams. Alice Corbin: st. louis, santa fe, william penhallow henderson, poetry magazine, the spinning woman of the desert, red earth: poems of new mexico, imagism, chicago modernism.
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.
Helen Hoyt
Alice Corbin
Emotional landscapes
Helen Hoyt: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.