John Reynolds, born about 1588 and believed to have died about 1655, was one of the most industrious and revealing English writers of the Stuart age. He was never a canonical figure in the manner of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, or John Milton, and the details of his private life are far less securely recorded than those of such celebrated contemporaries. Yet Reynolds deserves attention precisely becau…
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
John Reynolds
Poet B
Tobias George Smollett
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 68%
Blended 68%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Tobias George Smollett, baptized on 19 March 1721 and generally believed to have been born shortly before that date, was one of the most forceful, combative, and variously gifted writers of eighteenth-century Britain. He died on 17 September 1771, only about fifty years old, yet in that compressed lifetime he became a surgeon, naval observer, playwright, poet, translator, journalist, editor, political polemicist, his…
“Facts are stubborn things.”
In time
John Reynolds
Tobias George Smollett
1588
1771
Their lives did not overlap.
66 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 587 km separate Exeter, Devon, England from Dalquhurn, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
John Reynolds
Tobias George Smollett
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
fiction
John Reynolds: exeter, protestant polemicist, dolarnys primrose, the triumphs of god's revenge, spanish match, thirty years' war, vox coeli, votivae angliae. Tobias George Smollett: dalquhurn, vale of leven, dumbartonshire, the regicide, the tears of scotland, the adventures of roderick random, the adventures of peregrine pickle, hms chichester.
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
John Reynolds
Tobias George Smollett
1739
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
John Reynolds: Wonder, Joy, Tenderness. Tobias George Smollett: Peace, Joy, Tenderness.