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.
Abraham Cowley
Sir William Davenant
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the tumultuous landscape of seventeenth-century English literature, few figures shine with such early brilliance yet fade with such puzzling rapidity as Abraham Cowley. Born in 1618 in London, this prodigious poet who published his first collection at fifteen, who dazzled the cavalier court and influenced an entire generation of writers, who was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer and Spenser, somehow slipp…
“A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter in life's storms.”
Sir William Davenant, baptized on 3 March 1606 and buried on 9 April 1668 after his death on 7 April, was one of the great survivors and reinvigorators of seventeenth-century English literary culture. Poet, playwright, court servant, royalist officer, prisoner, theatrical entrepreneur, and eventually the leading architect of Restoration stage practice, he lived through an age in which a writer’s career could be trans…
“Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.”
About 83 km separate Fleet Street, City of London, England from Oxford, England. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Abraham Cowley: london, westminster abbey, edmund spenser, the faerie queene, westminster school, trinity college cambridge, english civil war, royalist. Sir William Davenant: oxford, crown tavern, frances stuart, fulke greville, the cruel brother, the temple of love, gondibert, poet laureate.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Abraham Cowley: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Sir William Davenant: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.
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