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 Kirbye
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…
“To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.”
George Kirbye, who died on 6 October 1634 and was probably born around 1565, belongs to the generation of English composers that brought the madrigal to one of its most graceful and expressive flowering points. He was a contemporary of Thomas Morley, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes, and John Bennet: musicians who absorbed Italian models and made them speak with a distinctly English accent. Kirbye was not among the most p…
About 77 km separate Stratford, Essex, England from Norwich, 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.
Francis Quarles: essex, romford, christ's college cambridge, ursula woodgate, a feast for wormes, hadassa, job militant, sion's elegies. George Kirbye: thomas morley, the first set of english madrigals, the triumphs of oriana, elizabethan madrigal movement, oxford university, who made thee, hob, forsake the plough?, thomas weelkes, pastoral comedy.
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 Kirbye: Wonder, Spirituality, Joy.
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