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
Alice Corbin
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 85%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Alice Corbin Henderson, born Alice Corbin on 16 April 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, and dead on 18 July 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupies an important if still insufficiently celebrated place in American literary history. She was a poet of lyrical concentration, an editor whose judgment helped define a revolutionary period in verse, a critic attentive to the relation between art and place, and a cultural organize…
“The result, so far as propaganda against war is concerned, is quite the opposite of the effect intended.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
Alice Corbin
1881
1949
They overlapped for 55 years (1894–1948).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, Alice Corbin was about 13.
Alice Corbin was about 67 when Howard Phelps Putnam died.
On the map
About 1,666 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Shared ground: United States.
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
From the biographies
Howard Phelps Putnam: allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét. Alice Corbin: st. louis, santa fe, william penhallow henderson, poetry magazine, the spinning woman of the desert, red earth: poems of new mexico, imagism, chicago modernism.
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
Alice Corbin
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.