Robert Williams Parry, known in literature as R. Williams Parry, was born on 6 March 1884 at Talysarn in the Nantlle Valley of Caernarfonshire, north-west Wales, and died on 4 January 1956. He became one of the most admired Welsh-language poets of the twentieth century, though he was never a prolific author in the ordinary commercial sense. His reputation rests instead upon a relatively small body of exceptionally fi…
Compare Poets
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.
Poet A
R. Williams Parry
Poet B
John Drinkwater
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 65%
Blended 65%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Drinkwater, born on 1 June 1882 and dead on 25 March 1937, was one of the most visible English men of letters of the years between the First World War and the rise of high modernism. Poet, playwright, actor, theatre manager, critic, lecturer, anthologist, and autobiographer, he possessed a public versatility that can make him seem difficult to place in retrospect. He was never a modernist in the manner of T. S.…
“Both are poetry, springing from the same imaginative activity, living through the same perfect selection and ordering of words, and, in our response, quickening the same ecstasy.”
In time
R. Williams Parry
John Drinkwater
1882
1956
They overlapped for 54 years (1884–1937).
When R. Williams Parry was born, John Drinkwater was about 2.
R. Williams Parry was about 53 when John Drinkwater died.
On the map
About 343 km separate Talysarn, Gwynedd, Wales from Dorset Villa, Leytonstone, Essex. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
R. Williams Parry
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
From the biographies
R. Williams Parry: talysarn, nantlle valley, yr haf a cherddi eraill, the summer and other poems, y llwynog, the fox, cynghanedd, welsh-language poetry. John Drinkwater: leytonstone, birmingham, georgian poetry, abraham lincoln, moonlit apples, tides of 1917, barry jackson, the death of leander.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
R. Williams Parry
John Drinkwater
1908
First Published Work
Emotional landscapes
R. Williams Parry: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. John Drinkwater: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.