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.
Thomas Shadwell
Ben Jonson
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Thomas Shadwell, born about 1642 and dead on 19 November 1692, was one of the busiest, most contentious, and most revealing writers of England’s Restoration. He wrote poems, prologues, epilogues, political satires, translations, and royal panegyrics, but his chief achievement was in the theatre. For more than two decades he supplied London with comedies whose streets, taverns, gaming rooms, spas, lodgings, laboratori…
“Hope is a very thin diet.”
Ben Jonson, baptized on 11 June 1572 and probably born on or very near that date, entered the world in Westminster at a moment when London’s theatrical culture was beginning to assume the force and richness that would make the English Renaissance famous. He died on 6 August 1637, having become, in the course of sixty-five turbulent years, England’s most formidable classical dramatist, one of its finest lyric poets, a…
“Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.”
About 175 km separate Santon Hall, Norfolk, England from Westminster, London, 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.
Thomas Shadwell: norfolk, santon hall, the sullen lovers, the libertine, the virtuoso, ben jonson, john dryden, whig polemicist. Ben Jonson: westminster, william camden, on my first son, on my first daughter, every man in his humour, the isle of dogs, gabriel spencer, war of the theatres.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Thomas Shadwell: Despair, Fear, Longing. Ben Jonson: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality.
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