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
Edward Rowland Sill
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 79%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Edward Rowland Sill was born on 29 April 1841 in Windsor, Connecticut, and died on 27 February 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio. His life was short, frequently unsettled, and shadowed by poor health, yet it produced a body of poetry and prose distinguished by moral seriousness, intellectual candor, and an unusual tenderness toward ordinary human weakness. He belonged to the generation of American writers who came after the fi…
“Let a man write about himself. It's the only fellow he knows anything about.”
In time
Sam Walter Foss
Edward Rowland Sill
1841
1911
They overlapped for 30 years (1858–1887).
When Sam Walter Foss was born, Edward Rowland Sill was about 17.
Sam Walter Foss was about 29 when Edward Rowland Sill died.
On the map
About 176 km separate Candia, New Hampshire, USA from Windsor, Connecticut, USA. Shared ground: United States, United Kingdom.
Edward Rowland Sill
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. Edward Rowland Sill: windsor, connecticut, cleveland, ohio, the hermitage and other poems, the venus of milo and other poems, harvard divinity school, mary b. sill, university of california, transcendentalism.
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
Edward Rowland Sill
1867
First Published Poem
Emotional landscapes
Sam Walter Foss: Tenderness, Peace, Joy. Edward Rowland Sill: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality.