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
Thomas Shadwell
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…
“Although it handles me so roughly yet I am not at all amated by it.”
Thomas Shadwell, born about 1642 and dead on 19 November 1692, was one of the busiest, most contentious, and most revealing writers of England’s Restoration. He wrote poems, prologues, epilogues, political satires, translations, and royal panegyrics, but his chief achievement was in the theatre. For more than two decades he supplied London with comedies whose streets, taverns, gaming rooms, spas, lodgings, laboratori…
“The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world.”
About 160 km separate Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England from Santon Hall, Norfolk, 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. Thomas Shadwell: norfolk, santon hall, the sullen lovers, the libertine, the virtuoso, ben jonson, john dryden, whig polemicist.
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. Thomas Shadwell: Despair, Fear, Longing.
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