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
William Shakespeare
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.”
William Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April 1564 in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and tradition places his birth three days earlier, on about 23 April. He died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in the same church where he had been baptized. Between those dates lies a life that is at once unusually well documented for a non-nobleman of the Elizabethan age and persistently elusive in its inward…
About 133 km separate Westminster, London, England from Stratford-upon-Avon, 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. William Shakespeare: stratford-upon-avon, anne hathaway, the lord chamberlain's men, venus and adonis, the rape of lucrece, as you like it, richard iii, king lear.
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. William Shakespeare: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.
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