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
Louis Untermeyer
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 70%
Blended 70%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the sprawling landscape of twentieth-century American letters, few figures cast as long or as peculiar a shadow as Louis Untermeyer. Born on October 1, 1885, in New York City, and dying ninety-two years later on December 18, 1977, in Newtown, Connecticut, Untermeyer occupied a unique position in American cultural life. He was not primarily remembered as a great poet himself, though he published volumes of verse. H…
“Poetry is the art of saying more and more with less and less.”
In time
Max Ehrmann
Louis Untermeyer
1872
1977
They overlapped for 61 years (1885–1945).
When Louis Untermeyer was born, Max Ehrmann was about 13.
Louis Untermeyer was about 60 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. Louis Untermeyer: new york city, newtown, connecticut, modern american poetry, harriet monroe, ezra pound, t.s. eliot, carl sandburg, robert frost.
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
Louis Untermeyer
Emotional landscapes
Max Ehrmann: Peace, Spirituality, Joy. Louis Untermeyer: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.