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

Witter Bynner Witter Bynner

Poet B

Patrick Reginald Chalmers Patrick Reginald Chalmers
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 66% Poems 87% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Witter Bynner

Witter Bynner

10 August 1881 – 1 June 1968 (~87)
4 live poems · English

Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…

“Poetry more than any other of the arts may be carried about by a man either in his own remembering heart or else in compact and easily available printed form.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Patrick Reginald Chalmers

Patrick Reginald Chalmers

27 June 1872 – 12 September 1942 (~70)
15 live poems · English

Patrick Reginald Chalmers was born on 27 June 1872 at Brechin, Angus, Scotland, and died on 12 September 1942. He belonged to that substantial but now less frequently discussed group of early twentieth-century British writers whose literary lives flourished outside the most conspicuous movements of their age. Chalmers was neither an avant-garde modernist nor a public prophet of national importance. He did not seek to…

“And yet it is delightful to have a gun-dog small enough to sit, all muddily, on your knee coming home in the car.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Georgian Poets, Irish Poets, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace

In time

Witter Bynner
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
1872 1968
They overlapped for 62 years (1881–1942). When Witter Bynner was born, Patrick Reginald Chalmers was about 9. Witter Bynner was about 61 when Patrick Reginald Chalmers died.

On the map

About 5,257 km separate Brooklyn, New York, USA from Brechin, Angus, Scotland. 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

social landscape

Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu. Patrick Reginald Chalmers: brechin, angus, green days and blue days, a picker of pebbles, punch and judy, at the tail of the weir, the obsessive angler, rugby school.

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.

Romance
Witter Bynner
76% love
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The Lass I Love
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
Ganymede
Witter Bynner
73% world
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Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
Romance
Witter Bynner
72% presence
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Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
Sands
Witter Bynner
72% world
Compare
Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
Foam
Witter Bynner
72%
Compare
Once, In the Dim Wood
Patrick Reginald Chalmers
Ganymede
Witter Bynner
72% spring, desire, world
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Spring Salmon
Patrick Reginald Chalmers

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Patrick Reginald Chalmers: Wonder, Tenderness, Peace.

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