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.
William Drummond
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.
William Drummond of Hawthornden was born on 13 December 1585 at Hawthornden, the family estate overlooking the River Esk near Lasswade in Midlothian, and died there on 4 December 1649. He belongs among the most accomplished Scottish poets of the early seventeenth century, though his reputation has long been complicated by the apparent contradictions in his work and character. He was a Scottish laird who wrote chiefly…
“A friend is a second self.”
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 603 km separate Hawthornden, Midlothian, Scotland from Plymouth, Devon, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
William Drummond: hawthornden, midlothian, teares on the death of meliades, poems: amorous, funerall, divine, pastorall, forth feasting, edmund spenser, sir philip sidney, wars of the three kingdoms. 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.
William Drummond: Sorrow, Spirituality, Wonder. William Strode: Tenderness, Wonder, Sorrow.
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