Thomas Jordan, born about 1612 and probably dead in 1685, was one of the most energetic professional writers in seventeenth-century London: poet, playwright, actor, pamphleteer, compiler, civic entertainments writer, and, from 1671, the City Poet responsible for helping to turn the Lord Mayor’s Show into a verbal as well as visual celebration of London. He has never occupied the canonical position of John Milton, And…
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
Thomas Jordan
Poet B
Ben Jonson
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 74%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Ben Jonson, baptized on 11 June 1572 and probably born on or very near that date, entered the world in Westminster at a moment when London’s theatrical culture was beginning to assume the force and richness that would make the English Renaissance famous. He died on 6 August 1637, having become, in the course of sixty-five turbulent years, England’s most formidable classical dramatist, one of its finest lyric poets, a…
“Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.”
In time
Thomas Jordan
Ben Jonson
1572
1685
They overlapped for 26 years (1612–1637).
When Thomas Jordan was born, Ben Jonson was about 40.
Thomas Jordan was about 25 when Ben Jonson died.
On the map
About 92 km separate Eynsham, Oxfordshire, England from Westminster, London, England. Both have ground in London.
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
london
comedy
Thomas Jordan: seventeenth-century london, city poet, lord mayor's show, thomas rawlins, messalina, poeticall varieties, a pill to purge melancholy, youths figaries. Ben Jonson: westminster, william camden, on my first son, on my first daughter, every man in his humour, the isle of dogs, gabriel spencer, war of the theatres.
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.
Thomas Jordan
Ben Jonson
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Jordan: Joy, Sensuality, Irony. Ben Jonson: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality.