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
Lizette Woodworth Reese
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 74%
Poems 85%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Lizette Woodworth Reese was born on 9 January 1856 in the Greenspring Valley area of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died in Baltimore on 17 December 1935. Her long life joined two very different literary ages. She was formed by the cadences, moral seriousness, and cultivated sentiment of nineteenth-century verse, yet some of her finest poems possess the compression, pictorial clarity, and emotional reserve that late…
In time
Myra Viola Wilds
Lizette Woodworth Reese
1856
1935
They overlapped for 56 years (1880–1935).
When Myra Viola Wilds was born, Lizette Woodworth Reese was about 24.
On the map
About 608 km separate Mount Ollie, Kentucky, USA from Greenspring, Baltimore County, Maryland, USA. Shared ground: United States.
Lizette Woodworth Reese
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. Lizette Woodworth Reese: baltimore, greenspring valley, david reese, mary elizabeth woodworth reese, a branch of may, tears, a handful of lavender, a quiet road.
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
Lizette Woodworth Reese
1880
First Published Poem
Emotional landscapes
Myra Viola Wilds: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Lizette Woodworth Reese: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.