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
Aphra Behn
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 73%
Poems 82%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Aphra Behn, born around 1640 and dead on 16 April 1689, occupies a singular position in English literary history: she was a successful Restoration playwright, a daring poet, an innovator in prose fiction, a political writer, and, most importantly for later generations, a woman who openly made writing her profession. Her precise origins remain uncertain, a fact that has invited both scholarly caution and romantic spec…
“I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this royal slave, to entertain my reader with the adventures of a feigned hero.”
In time
Katherine Philips
Aphra Behn
1632
1689
They overlapped for 25 years (1640–1664).
When Aphra Behn was born, Katherine Philips was about 8.
Aphra Behn was about 24 when Katherine Philips died.
On the map
About 82 km separate London, England from Wye, Kent, England. Both have ground in London.
Katherine Philips
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
women
woman
female
marriage
Katherine Philips: orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars. Aphra Behn: restoration playwright, surinam, oroonoko, the rover, the forc'd marriage, astrea, willmore, charles ii.
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.
1649
Trial of Charles I
Katherine Philips
Aphra Behn
Emotional landscapes
Katherine Philips: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. Aphra Behn: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality.