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
T. S. Eliot
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 86%
Blended 80%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…
“The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”
In time
Howard Phelps Putnam
T. S. Eliot
1888
1965
They overlapped for 55 years (1894–1948).
When Howard Phelps Putnam was born, T. S. Eliot was about 6.
T. S. Eliot was about 60 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
T. S. Eliot only
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. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.
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
T. S. Eliot
Emotional landscapes
Howard Phelps Putnam: Irony, Longing, Fear. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.