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.
Ben Jonson
Richard Barnefield
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Ben Jonson, baptized on 11 June 1572 and probably born on or very near that date, entered the world in Westminster at a moment when London’s theatrical culture was beginning to assume the force and richness that would make the English Renaissance famous. He died on 6 August 1637, having become, in the course of sixty-five turbulent years, England’s most formidable classical dramatist, one of its finest lyric poets, a…
“Words are the only things that live forever.”
Richard Barnefield, baptized on 29 June 1574 and buried in 1627, occupies a small but remarkably provocative place in the history of English Renaissance poetry. He was not among the most prolific writers of the Elizabethan age, nor did he sustain a public literary career over decades as Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, or William Shakespeare did. Yet the poems he published during a brief period in the 1590s have continued…
“Small is the gift, but great is my good-will; the which, by how much the lesse I am able to expresse it, by so much the more it is infinite.”
About 209 km separate Westminster, London, England from Norbury, Staffordshire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Ben Jonson: westminster, william camden, on my first son, on my first daughter, every man in his humour, the isle of dogs, gabriel spencer, war of the theatres. Richard Barnefield: staffordshire, norbury, the affectionate shepherd, cynthia, the legend of cassandra, oxford, brasnose college, male beauty.
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.
Ben Jonson: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality. Richard Barnefield: Sensuality, Longing, Wonder.
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