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
Sir Richard Fanshawe
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…
“The way to be safe is never to be secure.”
Sir Richard Fanshawe, born on 12 June 1608 and dead in Madrid in June 1666, lived one of the most various and hazardous lives available to a seventeenth-century English man of letters. He was at once a poet, translator, civil servant, soldier-administrator, parliamentarian, courtier, prisoner, exile, and ambassador. His name has never become as immediately familiar as those of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or John Dry…
About 75 km separate Stratford, Essex, England from Hertfordshire, 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.
Francis Quarles: essex, romford, christ's college cambridge, ursula woodgate, a feast for wormes, hadassa, job militant, sion's elegies. Sir Richard Fanshawe: madrid, the lusiad, ann fanshawe, jesus college, cavalier, the faithful shepherd, inner temple, civil war.
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. Sir Richard Fanshawe: Sensuality, Wonder, Fear.
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