William Miller Herschell, born 17 November 1873 in Spencer, Indiana, and dead 2 December 1939 in Indianapolis, became one of the best-loved poetic voices of his state. He was not a poet who sought cosmopolitan authority, avant-garde difficulty, or the permanent attention of the national literary establishment. His poems grew instead from railway shops, newspaper offices, creek banks, limestone country, family memory,…
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
W.M. Herschell
Poet B
Edgar A. Guest
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 77%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England, on 20 August 1881, and died in Detroit, Michigan, on 5 August 1959, fifteen days before his seventy-eighth birthday. During much of his long life, he was among the most familiar poets in the United States. His name appeared daily in newspapers, his verses were memorized in schools and recited at civic meetings, and his books sold in quantities that many more critica…
“if something happens to me, it must happen to other people”
In time
W.M. Herschell
Edgar A. Guest
1873
1959
They overlapped for 59 years (1881–1939).
When Edgar A. Guest was born, W.M. Herschell was about 8.
Edgar A. Guest was about 58 when W.M. Herschell died.
On the map
About 6,454 km separate Spencer, Indiana, USA from Birmingham, England. Shared ground: United States.
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
world war i
newspaper
home
ordinary
W.M. Herschell: spencer, indiana, indianapolis news, songs of the streets and byways, josephine pugh, robert burns, world war i, railroad machinist, blacksmith. Edgar A. Guest: birmingham, detroit, people's poet, a heap o' livin', just folks, the path to home, it couldn't be done, nellie crossman.
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.
W.M. Herschell
Edgar A. Guest
1898
First Published Poem
Emotional landscapes
W.M. Herschell: Tenderness, Joy, Sorrow. Edgar A. Guest: Joy, Tenderness, Peace.