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.
Sir Philip Sidney
Edward de Vere
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the pantheon of Elizabethan literature, few figures embody the Renaissance ideal as completely as Sir Philip Sidney. Born into privilege on November 30, 1554, at Penshurst Place in Kent, Sidney would live only thirty-one years, yet his brief existence would illuminate the literary landscape of England with such brilliance that his influence continues to resonate more than four centuries after his death. His life r…
“Thy necessity is greater than mine.”
Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was born on 12 April 1550 at Castle Hedingham in Essex and died on 24 June 1604. He belongs to the most vivid and difficult company of Elizabethan figures: a hereditary magnate with a celebrated name, a cultivated courtier, a patron of writers and players, a surviving lyric poet of real accomplishment, an erratic spendthrift, and, in later centuries, the center of a remarka…
About 96 km separate Penshurst Place, Kent, England from Castle Hedingham, Essex, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Sir Philip Sidney: penshurst place, battle of zutphen, fulke greville, the countess of pembroke's arcadia, old arcadia, new arcadia, astrophil and stella, robert dudley. Edward de Vere: castle hedingham, seventeenth earl of oxford, anne cecil, sir william cecil, the paradise of dainty devices, the phoenix nest, if women could be fair and yet not fond, the labouring man that tills the fertile soil.
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.
Sir Philip Sidney: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Edward de Vere: Irony, Anger, Sorrow.
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