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
John Reynolds
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 64%
Blended 64%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Reynolds, born about 1588 and believed to have died about 1655, was one of the most industrious and revealing English writers of the Stuart age. He was never a canonical figure in the manner of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, or John Milton, and the details of his private life are far less securely recorded than those of such celebrated contemporaries. Yet Reynolds deserves attention precisely becau…
In time
Sir Richard Fanshawe
John Reynolds
1588
1666
They overlapped for 48 years (1608–1655).
When Sir Richard Fanshawe was born, John Reynolds was about 20.
Sir Richard Fanshawe was about 47 when John Reynolds died.
On the map
About 269 km separate Hertfordshire, England from Exeter, Devon, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Sir Richard Fanshawe
John Reynolds
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
Sir Richard Fanshawe: madrid, the lusiad, ann fanshawe, jesus college, cavalier, the faithful shepherd, inner temple, civil war. John Reynolds: exeter, protestant polemicist, dolarnys primrose, the triumphs of god's revenge, spanish match, thirty years' war, vox coeli, votivae angliae.
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
John Reynolds
Emotional landscapes
Sir Richard Fanshawe: Sensuality, Wonder, Fear. John Reynolds: Wonder, Joy, Tenderness.