Max Ehrmann was born on 26 September 1872 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and died there on 9 September 1945, seventeen days before his seventy-third birthday. He is remembered almost everywhere as the author of “Desiderata,” the compact prose poem beginning, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste,” but that single work represents only the most widely circulated part of a long, earnest, and sometimes overlooked literary life…
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
Max Ehrmann
Poet B
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 69%
Blended 69%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 25 May 1803 and dead in Concord, Massachusetts, on 27 April 1882, became one of the defining voices of nineteenth-century American literature. He was at once a poet, essayist, lecturer, editor, religious dissenter, and public moralist, though no single title entirely contains him. His greatest influence lay in his ability to make philosophical inquiry sound urgen…
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”
In time
Max Ehrmann
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803
1945
They overlapped for 11 years (1872–1882).
When Max Ehrmann was born, Ralph Waldo Emerson was about 69.
Max Ehrmann was about 10 when Ralph Waldo Emerson died.
On the map
About 1,409 km separate Terre Haute, Indiana, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Max Ehrmann only
From the biographies
Max Ehrmann: terre haute, desiderata, bertha pratt king, depaul university, harvard university, delta tau delta, a fearsome riddle, the wife of marobius. Ralph Waldo Emerson: boston, concord, nature, transcendentalism, william emerson, mary moody emerson, ellen louisa tucker, lydia jackson.
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.
Max Ehrmann
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emotional landscapes
Max Ehrmann: Peace, Spirituality, Joy. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Wonder, Spirituality, Peace.