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
T. S. Eliot
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 66%
Blended 66%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…
“The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”
In time
R. Williams Parry
T. S. Eliot
1884
1965
They overlapped for 69 years (1888–1956).
When T. S. Eliot was born, R. Williams Parry was about 4.
T. S. Eliot was about 68 when R. Williams Parry died.
On the map
About 6,422 km separate Talysarn, Gwynedd, Wales from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. 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
T. S. Eliot only
From the biographies
tradition
R. Williams Parry: talysarn, nantlle valley, yr haf a cherddi eraill, the summer and other poems, y llwynog, the fox, cynghanedd, welsh-language poetry. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.
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
T. S. Eliot
Emotional landscapes
R. Williams Parry: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.