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.
George Herbert
William Browne, of Tavistock
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
George Herbert was born on 3 April 1593 into one of the great border families of Wales, at Montgomery Castle, the fifth son of Richard Herbert and Magdalen Newport Herbert. He died, not yet forty, on 1 March 1633 at Bemerton, near Salisbury, probably of consumption, after only a few years as a country priest. Between those two dates lies one of the most quietly dramatic lives in English literary history: a life that…
“Good words are worth much, and cost little.”
William Browne of Tavistock, born about 1588 and traditionally thought to have died about 1650, is one of the most attractive and elusive figures in early seventeenth-century English poetry. He was not a major public presence on the scale of Ben Jonson, John Donne, or George Wither, nor did he leave behind the unusually full documentary record that allows historians to reconstruct the lives of some contemporaries. Ye…
About 234 km separate Montgomery, Wales, United Kingdom from Tavistock, Devon, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
George Herbert: montgomery castle, magdalen herbert, john donne, the temple, the altar, easter wings, trinity college cambridge, public orator. William Browne, of Tavistock: devonshire, britannia's pastorals, the shepherd's pipe, george wither, exeter college, inner temple, pastoral writing, classical pastoral.
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.
George Herbert: Spirituality, Tenderness, Peace. William Browne, of Tavistock: Sensuality, Tenderness, Joy.
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