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.
Sir John Davies
Edmund Spenser
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Sir John Davies, born on 16 April 1569 and dying on 8 December 1626, was one of the most unusually gifted figures of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart world: a poet of intellectual elegance, a lawyer of formidable technical ability, a parliamentarian, an administrator of colonial Ireland, and a man whose life repeatedly exposed the tension between self-command and ambition. His literary reputation rests principal…
“A barbarous country is not so easily conquered as a civil.”
Edmund Spenser, born about 1552 and dead on 13 January 1599, was the most ambitious English poet of the later Elizabethan age and one of the chief architects of the English literary canon. His achievement rests above all on The Faerie Queene, the vast unfinished romance-epic through which he attempted to give Protestant England a national mythology, a moral education, and a poetic language equal to those of classical…
“To some I know this method will seem displeasing, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large.”
About 143 km separate Tisbury, Wiltshire, England from London, 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.
Sir John Davies: tisbury, chicksgrove, orchestra, nosce teipsum, queen's college oxford, middle temple, edmund spenser, christopher marlowe. Edmund Spenser: the faerie queene, london, geoffrey chaucer, robert dudley, sir philip sidney, the shepheardes calender, colonial ireland, kilcolman castle.
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.
Sir John Davies: Joy, Wonder, Peace. Edmund Spenser: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.
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