Myra Viola Wilds, born about 1880 and believed to have died about 1935, occupies an unusual and moving place in the history of American poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a single small book, Thoughts of Idle Hours, published in 1915, yet the modest scale of that achievement should not obscure its significance. Wilds was a Kentucky-born poet, a dressmaker, a woman with limited formal education, and…
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
Myra Viola Wilds
Poet B
Edna Wahlert McCourt
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 77%
Poems 81%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…
“He put himself through all the conventional gestures; his vocabulary through every pace, from flowery oratory to good U. S. A. slang.”
In time
Myra Viola Wilds
Edna Wahlert McCourt
1880
1963
They overlapped for 49 years (1887–1935).
When Edna Wahlert McCourt was born, Myra Viola Wilds was about 7.
Edna Wahlert McCourt was about 48 when Myra Viola Wilds died.
On the map
About 1,924 km separate Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA from Denver, Colorado, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Edna Wahlert McCourt
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
women
history
Myra Viola Wilds: mount ollie, kentucky, thoughts of idle hours, blindness, dressmaker, 1915 publication, sunshine, limited education. Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine.
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.
Myra Viola Wilds
Edna Wahlert McCourt
Emotional landscapes
Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.