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
A. Mary F. Robinson
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
Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, who published most often as A. Mary F. Robinson and became successively known in France as Madame Darmesteter and Madame Duclaux, was born on 27 February 1857 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and died in Aurillac, France, on 9 February 1944. Her unusually long life carried her from the high Victorian age into the Second World War; her writing career connected English Romantic and aestheti…
“I have marked in red the days on which I discovered certain poets, most certainly minor, who died centuries ago.”
In time
Katherine Philips
A. Mary F. Robinson
1632
1944
Their lives did not overlap.
193 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 133 km separate London, England from Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Katherine Philips
A. Mary F. Robinson
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
culture
Katherine Philips: orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars. A. Mary F. Robinson: leamington spa, aurillac, madame darmesteter, madame duclaux, a handful of honeysuckle, the new arcadia, emily brontë, james darmesteter.
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
A. Mary F. Robinson
1885
Move to Paris
Emotional landscapes
Katherine Philips: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. A. Mary F. Robinson: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.