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
Edith M. Thomas
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 82%
Blended 80%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Edith Matilda Thomas was born on 12 August 1854 in Chatham, Ohio, and died on 13 September 1925 in New York City. During her lifetime she was admired as one of the most accomplished American lyric poets of the late nineteenth century, praised by editors, fellow writers, and readers for verse that joined close observation of nature to emotional reserve, formal intelligence, and a searching spiritual imagination. Yet s…
“Great are my riches.”
In time
Myra Viola Wilds
Edith M. Thomas
1854
1935
They overlapped for 46 years (1880–1925).
When Myra Viola Wilds was born, Edith M. Thomas was about 26.
Myra Viola Wilds was about 45 when Edith M. Thomas died.
On the map
About 333 km separate Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA from Chatham, Ohio, USA. Shared ground: United States.
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
Myra Viola Wilds: mount ollie, kentucky, thoughts of idle hours, blindness, dressmaker, 1915 publication, sunshine, limited education. Edith M. Thomas: chatham, ohio, new york city, helen hunt jackson, a new year's masque, the inverted torch, lyrics and sonnets, northeastern ohio, romantic poetry.
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
Edith M. Thomas
Emotional landscapes
Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Edith M. Thomas: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.