Sir John Beaumont, first baronet of Grace Dieu, was born about 1583 and died on 19 April 1627. He belongs to that large and fascinating company of English writers whose work has survived more quietly than their fame deserved. In his own lifetime and for generations afterward, he was known not merely as a poet but as a gentleman of substantial standing: a landowner in Leicestershire, a member of a distinguished legal…
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
Sir John Beaumont
Poet B
William Broome
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.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 76%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Broome was born on 30 April 1689 and baptized three days later, on 3 May, at Haslington in Cheshire, near Crewe. He died at Bath on 16 November 1745. Although his name survives most readily in accounts of Alexander Pope’s Homer, Broome deserves attention as more than a subordinate craftsman in a famous enterprise. He was a clergyman, classicist, translator, occasional poet, schoolmaster, and ambitious partici…
“I prefix your Name to the following Poem, as a Monument of the long, and sincere Friendship I have born you: I am sensible you are too good a Judge of Poetry to approve it; however it will be a Testimony of my Respect.”
In time
Sir John Beaumont
William Broome
1583
1745
Their lives did not overlap.
62 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 80 km separate Grace Dieu, Leicestershire, England from Haslington, Cheshire, England. Both have ground in London.
Sir John Beaumont
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
Sir John Beaumont: grace dieu, leicestershire, roman catholic recusant, charles i, francis beaumont, the metamorphosis of tobacco, bosworth field, michael drayton. William Broome: haslington, cheshire, bath, alexander pope, iliad, odyssey, elijah fenton, charles cornwallis.
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
William Broome
Emotional landscapes
Sir John Beaumont: Sorrow, Tenderness, Despair. William Broome: Sorrow, Despair, Tenderness.