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.
Robert Herrick
Matthew Prior
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Robert Herrick was born in London on 24 August 1591 and died at Dean Prior in Devon on 15 October 1674. He is remembered as one of the supreme lyric poets of seventeenth-century England: a writer capable of making a four-line epigram feel as complete as a polished jewel, and of making flowers, ribbons, country festivals, kisses, bells, tears, and prayer seem charged with extraordinary significance. His poetry is ofte…
“The end of all our travail is to find rest.”
There is a peculiar pleasure in discovering a poet who has been, as it were, mislaid by history. Matthew Prior occupies precisely this position: celebrated in his own lifetime as one of England's finest wits, admired by Swift and Pope, fêted at the courts of Europe, and yet today known only to specialists and to those who have the good fortune to stumble across his poems in some dusty anthology. To read Prior is to e…
About 154 km separate Cheapside, London, England from Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Robert Herrick: london, dean prior, george villiers, carpe diem, to the virgins, to make much of time, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, upon a child that died, ben jonson. Matthew Prior: wimborne minster, charles sackville, the hind and the panther transvers'd, treaty of utrecht, richard busby, st john's college, mock-heroic verse, solomon on the vanity of the world.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Robert Herrick: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Matthew Prior: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
Install V2Melody
Add a home-screen icon for quicker listening in a simple app window.