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
Alfred Kreymborg
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 65%
Blended 65%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the early decades of the twentieth century, when American poetry was struggling to break free from the strictures of Victorian convention, a slight, chess-obsessed son of German immigrants emerged as one of the most influential figures in literary modernism. Alfred Kreymborg, born on December 10, 1883, in New York City, would become far more than a poet. He was a literary impresario, a talent scout with an uncanny…
“Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the people who really enjoy chess are the dubs and the duffers, experts who have resigned their ambitions, those who play only for pastime, and, of course, the great fraternity of the kibbitzers.”
In time
Max Ehrmann
Alfred Kreymborg
1872
1966
They overlapped for 63 years (1883–1945).
When Alfred Kreymborg was born, Max Ehrmann was about 11.
Alfred Kreymborg was about 62 when Max Ehrmann died.
On the map
About 1,148 km separate Terre Haute, Indiana, USA from New York City, New York, USA. 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
Max Ehrmann: terre haute, desiderata, bertha pratt king, depaul university, harvard university, delta tau delta, a fearsome riddle, the wife of marobius. Alfred Kreymborg: new york city, german immigrants, greenwich village, alfred stieglitz, the glebe, des imagistes, imagism, others: a magazine of the new verse.
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
Alfred Kreymborg
Emotional landscapes
Max Ehrmann: Peace, Spirituality, Joy. Alfred Kreymborg: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.