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.
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Milton, born in London on 9 December 1608 and dead there on 8 November 1674, lived through one of the most violent and intellectually fertile passages in English history. He was a poet, polemicist, scholar, civil servant, religious controversialist, educator, translator, and theorist of political liberty. To many readers he is above all the author of Paradise Lost, the English epic that retells the rebellion of…
“He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”
Andrew Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, in the small village of Winestead in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and Anne Pease Marvell. The family soon moved to the bustling port town of Hull when the elder Marvell was appointed lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of the Charterhouse, a charitable institution. Young Andrew grew up amid the sounds of the sea and the…
“There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery.”
About 249 km separate London, England from Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
John Milton: london, paradise lost, areopagitica, comus, lycidas, christ's college, puritan, galileo galilei. Andrew Marvell: winestead, hull, trinity college, mary fairfax, upon appleton house, the garden, to his coy mistress, the mower's song.
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.
John Milton: Peace, Spirituality, Wonder. Andrew Marvell: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.
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