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
Francis Quarles
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 66%
Blended 66%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Francis Quarles, baptized on 8 May 1592 and buried on 8 September 1644, was among the most widely read English devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In his own lifetime and for many generations afterward, his name was familiar in households that might never have owned the works of John Donne, George Herbert, or John Milton. His poetry was not designed chiefly for fashionable literary circles. It sought instead…
“To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.”
In time
Katherine Philips
Francis Quarles
1592
1664
They overlapped for 13 years (1632–1644).
When Katherine Philips was born, Francis Quarles was about 40.
Katherine Philips was about 12 when Francis Quarles died.
On the map
About 91 km separate London, England from Stratford, Essex, England. Both have ground in London.
Katherine Philips
Francis Quarles
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
london
culture
Katherine Philips: orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars. Francis Quarles: essex, romford, christ's college cambridge, ursula woodgate, a feast for wormes, hadassa, job militant, sion's elegies.
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
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Katherine Philips
Francis Quarles
1644
Final Years in Exile
Emotional landscapes
Katherine Philips: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. Francis Quarles: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.