Katherine Philips, born Katherine Fowler on 1 January 1632 and dead at only thirty-two on 22 June 1664, achieved a distinction that would have seemed improbable in the unsettled England of her youth: she became a celebrated poet while she was still alive, and she did so as a woman writing in forms and subjects conventionally claimed by men. Known to her readers and friends as “Orinda,” Philips fashioned poems of frie…
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
Katherine Philips
Poet B
Stephen Phillips
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.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 75%
Poems 86%
Blended 80%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Stephen Phillips, born on 28 July 1864 and dead at the distressingly early age of fifty-one on 9 December 1915, was one of the most celebrated English poets and verse dramatists of the years around 1900. For a brief but dazzling period, he seemed to many readers and theatre-goers to be the writer most likely to renew English poetic drama after Tennyson and Browning. His plays filled theatres, his poetry was widely re…
In time
Katherine Philips
Stephen Phillips
1632
1915
Their lives did not overlap.
200 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 84 km separate London, England from Summertown, Oxford, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Katherine Philips
Stephen Phillips
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
Katherine Philips only
From the biographies
Katherine Philips: orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars. Stephen Phillips: summertown, oxford, cicely chilcott, paolo and francesca, christ in hades, marpessa, trinity college cambridge, verse drama revival.
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
Katherine Philips
Stephen Phillips
Emotional landscapes
Katherine Philips: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. Stephen Phillips: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.