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
Ben King
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 75%
Poems 79%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Benjamin Franklin King Jr., known almost everywhere in print as Ben King, was born on 17 March 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, and died on 8 April 1894 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His life lasted only thirty-seven years, and his reputation has never approached that of the best-known American poets of his generation. Yet King was far from insignificant in his own day. He belonged to the large, lively, and now too often…
“If I should die to-night, and you should come to my cold corpse and say, weeping and longing, I would not care.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
Ben King
1857
1948
They overlapped for 1 year (1894–1894).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, Ben King was about 37.
Howard Phelps Putnam was about 0 when Ben King died.
On the map
About 1,194 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from St. Joseph, Michigan, 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
social
Howard Phelps Putnam: allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét. Ben King: st. joseph, michigan, bowling green, kentucky, if i should die to-night, late nineteenth-century, newspaper verse, comic prose, mark twain, james whitcomb riley.
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.
Howard Phelps Putnam
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. Ben King: Irony, Sorrow, Despair.