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.
Francis Quarles
George Herbert
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Francis Quarles, baptized on 8 May 1592 and buried on 8 September 1644, was among the most widely read English devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In his own lifetime and for many generations afterward, his name was familiar in households that might never have owned the works of John Donne, George Herbert, or John Milton. His poetry was not designed chiefly for fashionable literary circles. It sought instead…
“Be not too much in love with thine own opinions.”
George Herbert was born on 3 April 1593 into one of the great border families of Wales, at Montgomery Castle, the fifth son of Richard Herbert and Magdalen Newport Herbert. He died, not yet forty, on 1 March 1633 at Bemerton, near Salisbury, probably of consumption, after only a few years as a country priest. Between those two dates lies one of the most quietly dramatic lives in English literary history: a life that…
“Living well is the best revenge.”
About 288 km separate Stratford, Essex, England from Montgomery, Wales, United Kingdom. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Francis Quarles: essex, romford, christ's college cambridge, ursula woodgate, a feast for wormes, hadassa, job militant, sion's elegies. George Herbert: montgomery castle, magdalen herbert, john donne, the temple, the altar, easter wings, trinity college cambridge, public orator.
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.
Francis Quarles: Despair, Sorrow, Longing. George Herbert: Spirituality, Tenderness, Peace.
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