Orrick Glenday Johns occupies a curious and fascinating position in American literary history. He was neither fully absorbed into the canon of the great modernists nor forgotten entirely by literary historians. Instead, he stands at the threshold between the nineteenth-century poetic tradition and the restless experimentation of the early twentieth century. His life and work reflect a moment of transition in American…
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
Orrick Johns
Poet B
John Burroughs
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
On a spring morning in the Catskill Mountains, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sits beneath a gnarled apple tree, notebook in hand, watching a hermit thrush build its nest. This is John Burroughs in his element—not in a library or lecture hall, but in the cathedral of nature itself. For more than six decades, Burroughs served as America's interpreter of the natural world, transforming simple observations of…
“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.”
In time
Orrick Johns
John Burroughs
1837
1946
They overlapped for 35 years (1887–1921).
When Orrick Johns was born, John Burroughs was about 50.
Orrick Johns was about 34 when John Burroughs died.
On the map
About 897 km separate Sturgis, Michigan, USA from Roxbury, New York, USA. Both have ground in California.
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
philosophical
Orrick Johns: sturgis, michigan, asphalt and other poems, university of michigan, romantic tradition, lyric sensitivity, modern urban life, philosophical reflection, nineteenth-century tradition. John Burroughs: catskill mountains, roxbury, new york, walt whitman, ralph waldo emerson, wake-robin, slabsides, riverby, theodore roosevelt.
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.
Orrick Johns
John Burroughs
Emotional landscapes
Orrick Johns: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. John Burroughs: Peace, Spirituality, Joy.