Edwin John Ellis, born in London on 20 May 1848 and dead in 1916, belongs to that large but consequential company of late-Victorian writers whose names have faded while the movements, friendships, and acts of interpretation in which they participated remain central to literary history. He was a poet, painter, critic, editor, and imaginative theorist: a figure drawn to symbolism, myth, spiritual aspiration, and the af…
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
Edwin J. Ellis
Poet B
Myra Viola Wilds
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 64%
Blended 64%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Myra Viola Wilds, born about 1880 and believed to have died about 1935, occupies an unusual and moving place in the history of American poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a single small book, Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915, yet the modest scale of that achievement should not obscure its significance. Wilds was a Kentucky-born poet, a dressmaker, a woman with limited formal education, and…
“I do not seek Wealth, Fame or Place, among the great ones of my race, but I would pen in letters bold some thoughts perhaps to cheer the soul.”
In time
Edwin J. Ellis
Myra Viola Wilds
1848
1935
They overlapped for 37 years (1880–1916).
When Myra Viola Wilds was born, Edwin J. Ellis was about 32.
Myra Viola Wilds was about 36 when Edwin J. Ellis died.
On the map
About 6,417 km separate London, England from Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Edwin J. Ellis
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
history
Edwin J. Ellis: london, w. b. yeats, william blake, the works of william blake, seen in three days, fate in arcadia, pre-raphaelite movement, celtic revival. Myra Viola Wilds: mount ollie, kentucky, thoughts of idle hours, blindness, dressmaker, 1915 publication, sunshine, limited education.
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.
Edwin J. Ellis
Myra Viola Wilds
Emotional landscapes
Edwin J. Ellis: Spirituality, Wonder, Tenderness. Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality.