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
Aubrey Thomas de Vere
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 67%
Blended 67%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Aubrey Thomas de Vere was born on 10 January 1814 at Curragh Chase, the family estate near Adare in County Limerick, Ireland, and died there on 20 January 1902, ten days after his eighty-eighth birthday. He belonged to a world of inherited land, cultivated learning, Protestant Ascendancy privilege, and literary ambition, yet much of his life was spent interrogating the moral assumptions of that world. In the course o…
In time
R. Williams Parry
Aubrey Thomas de Vere
1814
1956
They overlapped for 19 years (1884–1902).
When R. Williams Parry was born, Aubrey Thomas de Vere was about 70.
R. Williams Parry was about 18 when Aubrey Thomas de Vere died.
On the map
About 295 km separate Talysarn, Gwynedd, Wales from Curragh Chase, County Limerick, Ireland. 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.
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. Aubrey Thomas de Vere: curragh chase, county limerick, protestant ascendancy, william wordsworth, john henry newman, the waldenses, the search after proserpine, great famine.
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
Aubrey Thomas de Vere
Emotional landscapes
R. Williams Parry: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Aubrey Thomas de Vere: Spirituality, Peace, Sorrow.