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
James Elroy Flecker
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 65%
Poems 79%
Blended 71%
Swap sides
Another related pair
The story of James Elroy Flecker is one of brilliant promise cut tragically short, of a poet who sought to recapture the lush exoticism and sensuous beauty of the Romantics in an age growing increasingly modernist and austere. Born Herman Elroy Flecker on November 5, 1884, in Lewisham, London, he would live only thirty years before tuberculosis claimed him, yet in that brief span he created a body of work that contin…
“It is true that the aim of poetry is to create beauty, but this beauty must be shaped by technique.”
In time
Orrick Johns
James Elroy Flecker
1884
1946
They overlapped for 29 years (1887–1915).
When Orrick Johns was born, James Elroy Flecker was about 3.
Orrick Johns was about 28 when James Elroy Flecker died.
On the map
About 6,231 km separate Sturgis, Michigan, USA from Deptford, London, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
James Elroy Flecker
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
Orrick Johns: sturgis, michigan, asphalt and other poems, university of michigan, romantic tradition, lyric sensitivity, modern urban life, philosophical reflection, nineteenth-century tradition. James Elroy Flecker: lewisham, tuberculosis, the bridge of fire, thirty-six poems, the golden journey to samarkand, hassan, hellé skiadaressi, parnassian.
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
James Elroy Flecker
Emotional landscapes
Orrick Johns: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. James Elroy Flecker: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.