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…
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
Richard Barnefield
Poet B
Barry Cornwall
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 76%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Bryan Waller Procter, known to generations of readers by the literary name Barry Cornwall, was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 21 November 1787, and died in London on 5 October 1874. He belonged to that broad, fascinating company of early nineteenth-century writers who stood close to the great Romantic generation without ever wholly entering its innermost circle. He was not a poet of Byron’s volcanic self-dramatization,…
“My father, although not a man of remarkable ability, possessed the most uncompromising honesty I ever met with.”
In time
Richard Barnefield
Barry Cornwall
1574
1874
Their lives did not overlap.
160 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 122 km separate Norbury, Staffordshire, England from Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Both have ground in England.
Richard Barnefield
Barry Cornwall
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
social
Richard Barnefield: staffordshire, norbury, the affectionate shepherd, cynthia, the legend of cassandra, oxford, brasnose college, male beauty. Barry Cornwall: leeds, charles lamb, adelaide anne procter, dramatic scenes and other poems, the life of edmund kean, english songs, the sea, touch us gently, time!.
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
Richard Barnefield
1592
Relocation to London
Barry Cornwall
1810
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
Richard Barnefield: Sensuality, Longing, Wonder. Barry Cornwall: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.