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.
Stephen Hawes
Geoffrey Chaucer
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Stephen Hawes, born about 1474 and probably dead by about 1523, occupies a fascinating and sometimes awkward place in English literary history. He is neither a major medieval master on the scale of Geoffrey Chaucer nor a fully developed Renaissance poet in the manner of later Tudor writers. Yet this apparent in-betweenness is precisely what makes him important. Hawes wrote at a moment when England was emerging from t…
“For though the day be never so long, At last the bells ringeth to evensong.”
Geoffrey Chaucer, born about 1343 in London and dead on 25 October 1400, stands at the beginning of the English literary tradition not because he was the first poet to write in English, but because he revealed on an unprecedented scale what English could do. In his poems, the language accommodates courtly elegance, religious meditation, philosophical argument, vulgar comedy, domestic quarrel, public satire, and intim…
“Now wol I preie mekely every discret persone that redith or herith this litel tretys, to have my rude enditing for excused.”
About 115 km separate Suffolk, England from London, England. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Stephen Hawes: henry vii, the pastime of pleasure, a joyfull meditation to all england, groom of the chamber, wars of the roses, courtly milieu, allegory, graunde amoure. Geoffrey Chaucer: london, the canterbury tales, the book of the duchess, hundred years' war, philippa de roet, john of gaunt, troilus and criseyde, elizabeth de burgh.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Stephen Hawes: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness. Geoffrey Chaucer: Longing, Sensuality, Wonder.
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