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.
William Browne of Tavistock, born about 1588 and traditionally thought to have died about 1650, is one of the most attractive and elusive figures in early seventeenth-century English poetry. He was not a major public presence on the scale of Ben Jonson, John Donne, or George Wither, nor did he leave behind the unusually full documentary record that allows historians to reconstruct the lives of some contemporaries. Ye…
“They believe the spirit which inspired the Reformation and the genius which dictated the Magna Charta possessed you.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Renaissance Poets
Giles Fletcher the Younger, born about 1586 and dead by November 1623, occupies a distinctive, if sometimes underappreciated, place in English Renaissance poetry. He was a poet of the generation after Edmund Spenser and before John Milton: too late to belong wholly to the Elizabethan flowering, too early to participate in the Civil War’s political and religious literary struggles, yet deeply connected to both periods…
They overlapped for 36 years (1588–1623).
When William Browne, of Tavistock was born, Giles Fletcher was about 2.
William Browne, of Tavistock was about 35 when Giles Fletcher died.
William Browne, of Tavistock:
devonshire, britannia's pastorals, the shepherd's pipe, george wither, exeter college, inner temple, pastoral writing, classical pastoral.
Giles Fletcher:
christ's victorie and triumph, jacobean age, edmund spenser, phineas fletcher, john fletcher, trinity college cambridge, thomas nevile, reader in greek grammar.
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.
