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.
Sir John Davies
William Strode
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Sir John Davies, born on 16 April 1569 and dying on 8 December 1626, was one of the most unusually gifted figures of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart world: a poet of intellectual elegance, a lawyer of formidable technical ability, a parliamentarian, an administrator of colonial Ireland, and a man whose life repeatedly exposed the tension between self-command and ambition. His literary reputation rests principal…
“A barbarous country is not so easily conquered as a civil.”
William Strode, baptized on 11 January 1602/3 and dead by 1645, belonged to that abundant but still partly shadowed generation of English writers who made the early seventeenth century one of the most inventive periods in the history of English poetry. He was a clergyman, Oxford academic, university orator, court entertainer, dramatist, and lyric poet. In each role he displayed verbal ease, learning, and an appetite…
About 157 km separate Tisbury, Wiltshire, England from Plymouth, Devon, England. Both have ground in England.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Sir John Davies: tisbury, chicksgrove, orchestra, nosce teipsum, queen's college oxford, middle temple, edmund spenser, christopher marlowe. William Strode: devonshire gentry, william laud, christ church oxford, the floating island, richard corbet, public orator, caroline manuscript verse, royalist.
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.
Sir John Davies: Joy, Wonder, Peace. William Strode: Tenderness, Wonder, Sorrow.
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