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
William Carlos Williams
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 79%
Poems 82%
Blended 80%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Carlos Williams was born on 17 September 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey, and died there on 4 March 1963. Few American writers made such a compelling argument, through both their lives and their art, that poetry could be found not in a remote ideal realm but in the streets outside one’s door, in a patient’s anxious face, in a backyard garden, in a refrigerator, or beside a muddy chicken yard. He was a physicia…
“I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
William Carlos Williams
1883
1963
They overlapped for 55 years (1894–1948).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, William Carlos Williams was about 11.
William Carlos Williams was about 65 when Howard Phelps Putnam died.
On the map
About 305 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Rutherford, New Jersey, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Howard Phelps Putnam
William Carlos Williams
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
speech
Howard Phelps Putnam: allston, massachusetts, jamaica plain, trinc, the five seasons, the earthly comedy, harvard, massachusetts, skull and bones, stephen vincent benét. William Carlos Williams: rutherford, new jersey, no ideas but in things, ezra pound, h.d., imagism, the young housewife, the red wheelbarrow.
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
William Carlos Williams
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. William Carlos Williams: Tenderness, Wonder, Peace.