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
Ezra Pound
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 74%
Poems 82%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on 30 October 1885 in Hailey, in the Idaho Territory of the United States, and died on 1 November 1972 in Venice, Italy. Few writers altered the course of twentieth-century poetry as decisively as he did, and few have left behind a legacy so divided between artistic admiration and moral revulsion. Pound was a poet, editor, translator, critic, impresario, polemicist, and tireless orga…
“Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
Ezra Pound
1885
1972
They overlapped for 55 years (1894–1948).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, Ezra Pound was about 9.
Ezra Pound was about 63 when Howard Phelps Putnam died.
On the map
About 3,484 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Hailey, Idaho, 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. Ezra Pound: hailey, venice, imagism, vorticism, t.s. eliot, james joyce, h.d., the cantos.
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
Ezra Pound
1972
Ezra Pound's Death
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. Ezra Pound: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality.