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 William Davenant
Thomas Jordan
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 William Davenant, baptized on 3 March 1606 and buried on 9 April 1668 after his death on 7 April, was one of the great survivors and reinvigorators of seventeenth-century English literary culture. Poet, playwright, court servant, royalist officer, prisoner, theatrical entrepreneur, and eventually the leading architect of Restoration stage practice, he lived through an age in which a writer’s career could be trans…
“Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.”
Thomas Jordan, born about 1612 and probably dead in 1685, was one of the most energetic professional writers in seventeenth-century London: poet, playwright, actor, pamphleteer, compiler, civic entertainments writer, and, from 1671, the City Poet responsible for helping to turn the Lord Mayor’s Show into a verbal as well as visual celebration of London. He has never occupied the canonical position of John Milton, And…
About 9 km separate Oxford, England from Eynsham, Oxfordshire, 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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
Sir William Davenant: oxford, crown tavern, frances stuart, fulke greville, the cruel brother, the temple of love, gondibert, poet laureate. Thomas Jordan: seventeenth-century london, city poet, lord mayor's show, thomas rawlins, messalina, poeticall varieties, a pill to purge melancholy, youths figaries.
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 William Davenant: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness. Thomas Jordan: Joy, Sensuality, Irony.
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