Howard Phelps Putnam was born in 1894 in Allston, Massachusetts, then a distinctly suburban and semi-rural part of Boston, and died on July 3, 1948, in Jamaica Plain. He belonged to the generation of American writers formed between the confident cultural inheritance of the nineteenth century and the disillusioning modernity of the First World War. His reputation never became as large as those of several Yale contempo…
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
Howard Phelps Putnam
Poet B
John Davidson
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 73%
Poems 82%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Davidson was born on 11 April 1857 in Barrhead, Renfrewshire, and died on 23 March 1909, or shortly thereafter, in the waters off Penzance, Cornwall. He was a Scottish poet, playwright, novelist, critic, journalist, and tireless literary experimenter whose work stands at a crucial threshold in British writing. In temperament and technique, he belonged neither wholly to the late Victorians nor wholly to the moder…
“A poet is always a man of inordinate ambition and of inordinate vanity. In his heart he says, I want my poetry to be remembered when Homer and Dante and Shakespeare are forgotten.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
John Davidson
1857
1948
They overlapped for 16 years (1894–1909).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, John Davidson was about 37.
Howard Phelps Putnam was about 15 when John Davidson died.
On the map
About 4,867 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Paisley, Scotland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Howard Phelps Putnam
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
John Davidson only
From the biographies
social
speech
Howard Phelps Putnam: allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét. John Davidson: barrhead, renfrewshire, penzance, alexander davidson, margaret mcarthur, in a music hall and other poems, fleet street eclogues, thirty bob a week.
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.
1895
The X-Ray Discovery
Howard Phelps Putnam
John Davidson
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. John Davidson: Spirituality, Wonder, Anger.