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…
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 Richard Fanshawe
Poet B
Abraham Cowley
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 75%
Poems 84%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the tumultuous landscape of seventeenth-century English literature, few figures shine with such early brilliance yet fade with such puzzling rapidity as Abraham Cowley. Born in 1618 in London, this prodigious poet who published his first collection at fifteen, who dazzled the cavalier court and influenced an entire generation of writers, who was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer and Spenser, somehow slipp…
“To be creative means to be in love with life.”
In time
Sir Richard Fanshawe
Abraham Cowley
1608
1667
They overlapped for 49 years (1618–1666).
When Abraham Cowley was born, Sir Richard Fanshawe was about 10.
Abraham Cowley was about 48 when Sir Richard Fanshawe died.
On the map
About 36 km separate Hertfordshire, England from Fleet Street, City of London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Sir Richard Fanshawe
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
cavalier
royalist
Sir Richard Fanshawe: madrid, the lusiad, ann fanshawe, jesus college, cavalier, the faithful shepherd, inner temple, civil war. Abraham Cowley: london, westminster abbey, edmund spenser, the faerie queene, westminster school, trinity college cambridge, english civil war, royalist.
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
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Sir Richard Fanshawe
1646
Return to England
Abraham Cowley
Emotional landscapes
Sir Richard Fanshawe: Sensuality, Wonder, Fear. Abraham Cowley: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.