Otto Leland Bohanan, born around 1895 in Washington, D.C., and dead in New York City on December 6, 1932, belonged to the first generation of African American artists whose work helped prepare the ground for the Harlem Renaissance. He was a poet, composer, baritone, teacher, and cultivated public intellectual, a figure whose gifts moved easily among literature, music, education, and fraternity life. His surviving rep…
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
Otto Leland Bohanan
Poet B
Robert Nichols
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 64%
Poems 80%
Blended 71%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…
“We are so impressed by the power of poetry that we think of it as something made by a wonderful and unusual person: we do not realize that all the wonder and marvel is in our own brains, that the poet is ourselves.”
In time
Otto Leland Bohanan
Robert Nichols
1893
1944
They overlapped for 38 years (1895–1932).
When Otto Leland Bohanan was born, Robert Nichols was about 2.
Robert Nichols was about 39 when Otto Leland Bohanan died.
On the map
About 5,860 km separate Washington, D.C., USA from Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Otto Leland Bohanan
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
Otto Leland Bohanan: washington, d.c., new york city, the dawn’s awake!, the washer-woman, omega psi phi, howard university, the crisis, w. e. b. du bois. Robert Nichols: shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets.
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
Otto Leland Bohanan
Robert Nichols
Emotional landscapes
Otto Leland Bohanan: Joy, Longing, Wonder. Robert Nichols: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.