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
Thomas d'Urfey
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…
“And wit's the noblest frailty of the mind.”
Thomas d’Urfey, born about 1653 and dead on 26 February 1723, was one of the most tireless entertainers in English literary history: a playwright, lyricist, ballad-writer, compiler, performer, political satirist, and convivial public personality whose career stretched from the high Restoration of Charles II to the early Hanoverian age. He has seldom occupied the first rank in conventional histories of English literat…
“My good or ill stars ordained me to be a knight errant in the fairy fields of poetry.”
About 421 km separate Santon Hall, Norfolk, England from Devon, 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. Thomas d'Urfey: exeter, charles ii, james butler, the siege of memphis, madam fickle, a fond husband, squire oldsapp, the comical history of don quixote.
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.
Thomas Shadwell: Despair, Fear, Longing. Thomas d'Urfey: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder.
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