Sam Walter Foss was born on 19 June 1858 in Candia, New Hampshire, a small rural community whose fields, roads, churches, village shops, and close social networks supplied the emotional landscape of much of his later poetry. He died on 26 February 1911 in Somerville, Massachusetts, at the age of fifty-two. Between those dates he became one of the best-known popular poets in the United States, though not one of its mo…
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
Sam Walter Foss
Poet B
Arthur Davison Ficke
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 76%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Arthur Davison Ficke was born in Davenport, Iowa, on 10 November 1883, at a moment when the United States was rapidly becoming both an industrial power and a more self-conscious literary nation. He died on 30 November 1945, at the age of sixty-two, leaving a body of poetry that can seem difficult to classify neatly. He was at once a disciplined maker of sonnets, a cosmopolitan traveler, a student of Asian cultures, a…
“A word carefully chosen can outlast a stone monument built to pride.”
In time
Sam Walter Foss
Arthur Davison Ficke
1858
1945
They overlapped for 29 years (1883–1911).
When Arthur Davison Ficke was born, Sam Walter Foss was about 25.
Arthur Davison Ficke was about 28 when Sam Walter Foss died.
On the map
About 1,593 km separate Candia, New Hampshire, USA from Davenport, Iowa, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Arthur Davison Ficke
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
education
Sam Walter Foss: candia, new hampshire, somerville, massachusetts, back country poems, the house by the side of the road, brown university, phillips exeter academy, gilded age, progressive era. Arthur Davison Ficke: davenport, iowa, spectra hoax, witter bynner, anne knish, harvard university, the breaking of bonds, sonnets of a portrait-painter.
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.
Sam Walter Foss
Arthur Davison Ficke
Emotional landscapes
Sam Walter Foss: Tenderness, Peace, Joy. Arthur Davison Ficke: Fear, Sorrow, Wonder.