George Sterling was born on 1 December 1869 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, and died on 17 November 1926 in San Francisco, California. During his lifetime he was celebrated, often extravagantly, as the foremost poet of the American Pacific Coast: a writer of redwood groves, desert immensities, sea fog, cosmic fire, erotic dream, and supernatural terror. His reputation later suffered a dramatic eclipse. The rich…
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
George Sterling
Poet B
Witter Bynner
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 77%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…
“Wordsworth, of our poets, comes closest to the Chinese; but their poetry cleaves even nearer to nature than his.”
In time
George Sterling
Witter Bynner
1869
1968
They overlapped for 46 years (1881–1926).
When Witter Bynner was born, George Sterling was about 12.
Witter Bynner was about 45 when George Sterling died.
On the map
About 143 km separate Sag Harbor, New York, USA from Brooklyn, New York, USA. Both have ground in New York.
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
social
George Sterling: sag harbor, san francisco, the testimony of the suns, a wine of wizardry, ambrose bierce, jack london, bohemian club, california poet. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.
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.
George Sterling
Witter Bynner
Emotional landscapes
George Sterling: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.