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…
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
Stephen Hawes
Poet B
Geoffrey Chaucer
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 77%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
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…
“And preie God save the kyng, that is lord of this langage.”
In time
Stephen Hawes
Geoffrey Chaucer
1343
1523
Their lives did not overlap.
74 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 115 km separate Suffolk, England from London, England. Both have ground in London.
Stephen Hawes
Geoffrey Chaucer
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
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.
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
Stephen Hawes
Geoffrey Chaucer
Emotional landscapes
Stephen Hawes: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness. Geoffrey Chaucer: Longing, Sensuality, Wonder.