Joshua Sylvester, born in 1563 and dead on 28 September 1618, occupied an unusual and important place in the literary culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He was neither a university poet in the manner of many learned writers nor a wholly court-dependent figure; he was a merchant, a translator, a religious poet, a public panegyrist, a husband and father, and, for a time, a servant of the royal household. His…
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
Joshua Sylvester
Poet B
William Oldys
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 74%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Oldys, born on 14 July 1696 and dead on 15 April 1761, belongs to that remarkable class of literary figures whose influence exceeds their modern fame. He was a poet only intermittently, an editor often anonymously, a biographer by patient accumulation, a bibliographer before bibliography had fully become a profession, and an antiquary whose chief subject was the survival of the written past. To encounter Oldy…
“We hardly ever find the worth of books till we lose them; and it is then too late to value them.”
In time
Joshua Sylvester
William Oldys
1563
1761
Their lives did not overlap.
78 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 67 km separate Kent, England from London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Joshua Sylvester
William Oldys
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
From the biographies
history
Joshua Sylvester: merchant adventurer, guillaume de salluste, du bartas, divine weekes and workes, henry iv of france, adrian à saravia, william plumbe, protestant culture. William Oldys: scarborough miscellany, on a fly drinking out of his cup, thomas watson-wentworth, edward harley, the british muse, the muses library, south sea bubble, eighteenth-century antiquarianism.
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
Joshua Sylvester
William Oldys
Emotional landscapes
Joshua Sylvester: Tenderness, Longing, Spirituality. William Oldys: Sorrow, Wonder, Peace.