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
Matthew Prior
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…
“The best revenge is not to be like him who did the injury.”
There is a peculiar pleasure in discovering a poet who has been, as it were, mislaid by history. Matthew Prior occupies precisely this position: celebrated in his own lifetime as one of England's finest wits, admired by Swift and Pope, fêted at the courts of Europe, and yet today known only to specialists and to those who have the good fortune to stumble across his poems in some dusty anthology. To read Prior is to e…
About 153 km separate Fleet Street, City of London, England from Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
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. Matthew Prior: wimborne minster, charles sackville, the hind and the panther transvers'd, treaty of utrecht, richard busby, st john's college, mock-heroic verse, solomon on the vanity of the world.
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. Matthew Prior: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.
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