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
Elizabeth Thomas
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 76%
Poems 79%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Elizabeth Thomas, who wrote under the name “Corinna,” was born in 1675 and died in 1731. She belongs to that large and fascinating company of early eighteenth-century women writers whose lives survive only in fragments: poems, letters, dedications, hostile anecdotes, printers’ advertisements, and the recollections of men whose literary fame later eclipsed theirs. Yet Thomas was far more than a minor satellite of Alex…
In time
Katherine Philips
Elizabeth Thomas
1632
1731
Their lives did not overlap.
11 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 188 km separate London, England from Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, Wales. Both have ground in Cymru / Wales.
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
friendship
women
woman
social
culture
reputation
Katherine Philips: orinda, society of friendship, friendship's mystery, james philips, cardiganshire, london, puritan culture, civil wars. Elizabeth Thomas: skenfrith, monmouthshire, corinna, richard gwinnett, pylades, alexander pope, miscellany poems on several subjects, eighteenth-century women writers.
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
Elizabeth Thomas
Emotional landscapes
Katherine Philips: Tenderness, Spirituality, Wonder. Elizabeth Thomas: Despair, Sorrow, Anger.