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
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%
Blended 75%
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
Sam Walter Foss
Howard Phelps Putnam
1858
1948
They overlapped for 18 years (1894–1911).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, Sam Walter Foss was about 36.
Howard Phelps Putnam was about 17 when Sam Walter Foss died.
On the map
About 82 km separate Candia, New Hampshire, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Boston and Massachusetts.
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.
Shared
From the biographies
social
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. 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
Sam Walter Foss
Howard Phelps Putnam
Emotional landscapes
Sam Walter Foss: Tenderness, Peace, Joy. Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear.