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

W. H. Davies W. H. Davies

Poet B

Max Ehrmann Max Ehrmann
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.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 69% Poems 87% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
W. H. Davies

W. H. Davies

3 July 1871 – 26 September 1940 (~69)
23 live poems · English

William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…

“Such books are never any good to me, for, if I enjoy them, I am robbed of that joy by the thought that they are not mine.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
Max Ehrmann

Max Ehrmann

26 September 1872 – 9 September 1945 (~73)
2 live poems · English

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…

“I see there is a good deal of grandiloquence in my book—my friends and foes have told me. I think it must be true, for there is a good deal of grandiloquence in me—and in nature also: I saw a sunset last evening that was a gross imposition upon modesty.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace

In time

W. H. Davies
Max Ehrmann
1871 1945
They overlapped for 69 years (1872–1940). When Max Ehrmann was born, W. H. Davies was about 1. Max Ehrmann was about 68 when W. H. Davies died.

On the map

About 6,340 km separate Newport, Wales from Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

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

W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp. Max Ehrmann: terre haute, desiderata, bertha pratt king, depaul university, harvard university, delta tau delta, a fearsome riddle, the wife of marobius.

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.

Strong Moments
W. H. Davies
80% social, self
Compare
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
Love's Inspiration
W. H. Davies
79% love
Compare
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
The Starved
W. H. Davies
77% love, social
Compare
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
Love's Caution
W. H. Davies
77% love
Compare
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
Life is Jolly
W. H. Davies
75% life
Compare
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
Joy Supreme
W. H. Davies
74%
Compare
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing. Max Ehrmann: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace.

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