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.
Andrew Marvell
Michael Drayton
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Andrew Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, in the small village of Winestead in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and Anne Pease Marvell. The family soon moved to the bustling port town of Hull when the elder Marvell was appointed lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of the Charterhouse, a charitable institution. Young Andrew grew up amid the sounds of the sea and the…
“I need not tell you I am always thinking of you.”
In the pantheon of English Renaissance poetry, few figures embody the spirit of their age quite like Michael Drayton, a writer whose extraordinary career spanned nearly five decades and witnessed the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Born in 1563, the same year as Christopher Marlowe, Drayton would outlive most of his illustrious contemporaries to become one of the longest-serving poets of the English Re…
About 167 km separate Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England from Hartshill, Warwickshire, 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.
Andrew Marvell: winestead, hull, trinity college, mary fairfax, upon appleton house, the garden, to his coy mistress, the mower's song. Michael Drayton: hartshill, warwickshire, anne goodere, poly-olbion, the harmony of the church, the shepherd's garland, the barons' wars, england's heroical epistles.
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.
Andrew Marvell: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Michael Drayton: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.
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