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
Arthur Hugh Clough
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 87%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Arthur Hugh Clough, born in Liverpool on 1 January 1819 and dead in Florence on 13 November 1861, occupies an unusual and compelling place in nineteenth-century English poetry. He was a Victorian poet, but he often sounds impatient with the assurances conventionally associated with Victorian verse: confidence in progress, confidence in religious doctrine, confidence in moral formulas, and confidence that elevated poe…
“People won’t read Chaucer against their ears.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
Arthur Hugh Clough
1819
1948
Their lives did not overlap.
33 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 5,023 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Liverpool, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Howard Phelps Putnam
Arthur Hugh Clough
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
Howard Phelps Putnam: allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét. Arthur Hugh Clough: liverpool, florence, charleston, thomas arnold, matthew arnold, oxford movement, amours de voyage, the bothie of tober-na-vuolich.
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
Howard Phelps Putnam
Arthur Hugh Clough
1840
Crisis of Faith
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. Arthur Hugh Clough: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.