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
W.M. Herschell
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 71%
Blended 71%
Swap sides
Another related pair
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,…
In time
Max Ehrmann
W.M. Herschell
1872
1945
They overlapped for 67 years (1873–1939).
When W.M. Herschell was born, Max Ehrmann was about 1.
Max Ehrmann was about 67 when W.M. Herschell died.
On the map
About 164 km separate Terre Haute, Indiana, USA from Spencer, Indiana, USA. Both have ground in Indiana.
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
indiana
Max Ehrmann: terre haute, desiderata, bertha pratt king, depaul university, harvard university, delta tau delta, a fearsome riddle, the wife of marobius. W.M. Herschell: spencer, indiana, indianapolis news, songs of the streets and byways, josephine pugh, robert burns, world war i, railroad machinist, blacksmith.
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
W.M. Herschell
Emotional landscapes
Max Ehrmann: Peace, Spirituality, Joy. W.M. Herschell: Tenderness, Joy, Sorrow.