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
Elinor Wylie
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 76%
Poems 84%
Blended 80%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Elinor Wylie, born Elinor Morton Hoyt on 7 September 1885 in Somerville, New Jersey, belonged to an American generation that inherited Victorian social codes yet came of age amid modernism, women’s expanding public ambitions, war, cosmopolitan travel, and changing ideas of artistic freedom. She would become known as one of the most distinctive lyric poets of the 1920s: a writer of polished, compressed, often formally…
“I never had such a lovely time in my life, and Philip's absolutely perfect.”
In time
Myra Viola Wilds
Elinor Wylie
1880
1935
They overlapped for 44 years (1885–1928).
When Elinor Wylie was born, Myra Viola Wilds was about 5.
Myra Viola Wilds was about 48 when Elinor Wylie died.
On the map
About 822 km separate Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA from Somerville, New Jersey, 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
Myra Viola Wilds: mount ollie, kentucky, thoughts of idle hours, blindness, dressmaker, 1915 publication, sunshine, limited education. Elinor Wylie: somerville, new jersey, nets to catch the wind, velvet shoes, wild peaches, black armour, horace wylie, philip hichborn.
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
Elinor Wylie
Emotional landscapes
Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Elinor Wylie: Wonder, Irony, Joy.