Orrick Glenday Johns occupies a curious and fascinating position in American literary history. He was neither fully absorbed into the canon of the great modernists nor forgotten entirely by literary historians. Instead, he stands at the threshold between the nineteenth-century poetic tradition and the restless experimentation of the early twentieth century. His life and work reflect a moment of transition in American…
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
Orrick Johns
Poet B
Arthur Symons
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 70%
Poems 83%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Arthur Symons was born on 28 February 1865 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, into a household shaped by religious discipline, frequent movement, and intellectual aspiration. He was the son of the Reverend Arthur Symons, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Mary Ann Symons. His father’s ministry required the family to move from place to place, and the boy’s childhood was therefore less rooted in one local communit…
“The secret of Rimbaud, I think, is that his mind was not the mind of the artist, but of the man of action. He was a dreamer, but all his dreams were discoveries.”
In time
Orrick Johns
Arthur Symons
1865
1946
They overlapped for 59 years (1887–1945).
When Orrick Johns was born, Arthur Symons was about 22.
Orrick Johns was about 58 when Arthur Symons died.
On the map
About 5,906 km separate Sturgis, Michigan, USA from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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
Orrick Johns: sturgis, michigan, asphalt and other poems, university of michigan, romantic tradition, lyric sensitivity, modern urban life, philosophical reflection, nineteenth-century tradition. Arthur Symons: milford haven, wales, reverend arthur symons, days and nights, silhouettes, london literary life, rhymers' club, w. b. yeats.
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.
Orrick Johns
Arthur Symons
Emotional landscapes
Orrick Johns: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Arthur Symons: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.