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
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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 61%
Poems 82%
Blended 70%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public intellectual. He was often called the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” after his most celebrated prose…
“Nothing that one commits to paper is ever half so good as his great unwritten article.”
In time
Myra Viola Wilds
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
1809
1935
They overlapped for 15 years (1880–1894).
When Myra Viola Wilds was born, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was about 71.
Myra Viola Wilds was about 14 when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. died.
On the map
About 1,174 km separate Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: cambridge, massachusetts, boston, old ironsides, the contagiousness of puerperal fever, the autocrat of the breakfast-table, amelia lee jackson, harvard college, hasty pudding club.
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
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Emotional landscapes
Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.