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
Matthew Prior
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 70%
Poems 75%
Blended 72%
Swap sides
Another related pair
There is a peculiar pleasure in discovering a poet who has been, as it were, mislaid by history. Matthew Prior occupies precisely this position: celebrated in his own lifetime as one of England's finest wits, admired by Swift and Pope, fêted at the courts of Europe, and yet today known only to specialists and to those who have the good fortune to stumble across his poems in some dusty anthology. To read Prior is to e…
In time
Sir Richard Fanshawe
Matthew Prior
1608
1721
They overlapped for 3 years (1664–1666).
When Matthew Prior was born, Sir Richard Fanshawe was about 56.
Matthew Prior was about 2 when Sir Richard Fanshawe died.
On the map
About 175 km separate Hertfordshire, England from Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England. Both have ground in England.
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
Sir Richard Fanshawe only
From the biographies
Sir Richard Fanshawe: madrid, the lusiad, ann fanshawe, jesus college, cavalier, the faithful shepherd, inner temple, civil war. Matthew Prior: wimborne minster, charles sackville, the hind and the panther transvers'd, treaty of utrecht, richard busby, st john's college, mock-heroic verse, solomon on the vanity of the world.
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
Matthew Prior
1701
First Published Poem
Emotional landscapes
Sir Richard Fanshawe: Sensuality, Wonder, Fear. Matthew Prior: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.