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
Robinson Jeffers
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 62%
Blended 62%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the pantheon of American poetry, few figures stand as simultaneously revered and controversial as Robinson Jeffers, the brooding visionary who built his stone tower on the wild coast of California and crafted verses as uncompromising as the granite cliffs that inspired them. Born John Robinson Jeffers on January 10, 1887, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he would become one of the twentieth century's most distinctive…
“I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are interdependent, and therefore one part cannot be separated from the whole.”
In time
Max Ehrmann
Robinson Jeffers
1872
1962
They overlapped for 59 years (1887–1945).
When Robinson Jeffers was born, Max Ehrmann was about 15.
Robinson Jeffers was about 58 when Max Ehrmann died.
On the map
About 641 km separate Terre Haute, Indiana, USA from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 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. Robinson Jeffers: inhumanism, tor house, hawk tower, una call kuster, big sur, california coast, the bowl of blood, tamar and other poems.
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
Robinson Jeffers
Emotional landscapes
Max Ehrmann: Peace, Spirituality, Joy. Robinson Jeffers: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder.