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
Maxwell Bodenheim
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 69%
Poems 84%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Maxwell Bodenheim's life reads like one of his own feverish poems—raw, defiant, laced with startling imagery, and shadowed by a restless hunger for freedom that both illuminated and destroyed him. Born into the humid anonymity of a small Southern town, he rose to become the self-crowned King of Greenwich Village bohemians during the glittering, gin-soaked Jazz Age, only to tumble into poverty, ridicule, and a violent…
“Great creators always have a few weaknesses in their main trends, and one of the attributes of greatness lies in its ability to overcome its own imperfections.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
Maxwell Bodenheim
1892
1954
They overlapped for 55 years (1894–1948).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, Maxwell Bodenheim was about 2.
Maxwell Bodenheim was about 56 when Howard Phelps Putnam died.
On the map
About 2,092 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Hermanville, Mississippi, 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. Maxwell Bodenheim: hermanville, greenwich village, jazz age, minna and myself, ben hecht, chicago renaissance, others anthology, the shop.
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
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. Maxwell Bodenheim: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.