Joseph Milton Hayes, known to the public as J. Milton Hayes, was born in Bristol on 13 January 1884 and died on 6 February 1940. During his lifetime he became one of the best-known writers of recitation verse in Britain, a poet whose work was heard as often as it was read. His celebrity rested especially on “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God,” a narrative poem whose opening line, “There’s a one-eyed yellow idol…
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
J. Milton Hayes
Poet B
Ben King
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 73%
Blended 73%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Benjamin Franklin King Jr., known almost everywhere in print as Ben King, was born on 17 March 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, and died on 8 April 1894 in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His life lasted only thirty-seven years, and his reputation has never approached that of the best-known American poets of his generation. Yet King was far from insignificant in his own day. He belonged to the large, lively, and now too often…
“If I should die to-night, and you should come to my cold corpse and say, weeping and longing, I would not care.”
In time
J. Milton Hayes
Ben King
1857
1940
They overlapped for 11 years (1884–1894).
When J. Milton Hayes was born, Ben King was about 27.
J. Milton Hayes was about 10 when Ben King died.
On the map
About 6,027 km separate Leeds, Yorkshire, England from St. Joseph, Michigan, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
J. Milton Hayes
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
popular
culture
J. Milton Hayes: bristol, the green eye of the little yellow god, khatmandu, the punch and judy man, edwardian period, music halls, variety theatres, public recitations. Ben King: st. joseph, michigan, bowling green, kentucky, if i should die to-night, late nineteenth-century, newspaper verse, comic prose, mark twain, james whitcomb riley.
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.
J. Milton Hayes
Emotional landscapes
J. Milton Hayes: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Ben King: Irony, Sorrow, Despair.