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
Pei Di
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 70%
Blended 70%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Pei Di, traditionally dated 714 to about 800, lived through one of the most brilliant and one of the most traumatic periods in the history of the Tang dynasty. He is remembered principally as the intimate friend and poetic counterpart of Wang Wei, the great painter-poet whose name has come to define the contemplative landscape poetry of the age. Yet Pei Di deserves attention not merely as Wang Wei’s companion or as a…
In time
R. Williams Parry
Pei Di
714
1956
Their lives did not overlap.
1084 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 8,393 km separate Talysarn, Gwynedd, Wales from Chang'an, China. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
landscape
R. Williams Parry: talysarn, nantlle valley, yr haf a cherddi eraill, the summer and other poems, y llwynog, the fox, cynghanedd, welsh-language poetry. Pei Di: tang dynasty, wang wei, zhang jiuling, chang'an, guanzhong region, wangchuan, kaiyuan era, landscape poetry.
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
R. Williams Parry
Emotional landscapes
R. Williams Parry: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Pei Di: Longing, Wonder, Peace.