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
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
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
Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow, was born on 10 June 1781 in the Temple, London, and died at Brighton on 4 June 1829, six days before his forty-eighth birthday. He lived during one of the most turbulent and brilliant eras in English literary history: the age of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Regency, and the flowering of Romantic poetry. Yet he occupied an unusual position within that age…
In time
Joshua Sylvester
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
1563
1829
Their lives did not overlap.
163 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 67 km separate Kent, England from Westminster, London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Joshua Sylvester
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
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
Joshua Sylvester: merchant adventurer, guillaume de salluste, du bartas, divine weekes and workes, henry iv of france, adrian à saravia, william plumbe, protestant culture. Edward Hovell-Thurlow: temple, london, brighton, second baron thurlow, thomas thurlow, anne bere, edward thurlow, charterhouse school, magdalen college, oxford.
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
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
Emotional landscapes
Joshua Sylvester: Tenderness, Longing, Spirituality. Edward Hovell-Thurlow: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness.