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
Matthew Prior
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.”
There is a peculiar pleasure in discovering a poet who has been, as it were, mislaid by history. Matthew Prior occupies precisely this position: celebrated in his own lifetime as one of England's finest wits, admired by Swift and Pope, fêted at the courts of Europe, and yet today known only to specialists and to those who have the good fortune to stumble across his poems in some dusty anthology. To read Prior is to e…
About 354 km separate Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England from Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
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. Matthew Prior: wimborne minster, charles sackville, the hind and the panther transvers'd, treaty of utrecht, richard busby, st john's college, mock-heroic verse, solomon on the vanity of the world.
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. Matthew Prior: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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