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
James Shirley
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 72%
Blended 72%
Swap sides
Another related pair
James Shirley, born in September 1596 and buried on 29 October 1666, was the last major dramatist of England’s long Renaissance theatrical age. His life extended from the final years of Elizabeth I through the reigns of James I and Charles I, the civil wars, the Puritan Commonwealth, and the first years of the Restoration. That span placed him at the center of extraordinary transformations in English religion, politi…
“Poetry is the child of nature, which, regulated and made beautiful by art, presenteth the most harmonious of all other compositions; among which (if we rightly consider) the dramatical is the most absolute.”
In time
Thomas Jordan
James Shirley
1596
1685
They overlapped for 55 years (1612–1666).
When Thomas Jordan was born, James Shirley was about 16.
Thomas Jordan was about 54 when James Shirley died.
On the map
About 92 km separate Eynsham, Oxfordshire, England from London, England. Both have ground in London.
James Shirley
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
london
theatre
restoration
comedy
Thomas Jordan: seventeenth-century london, city poet, lord mayor's show, thomas rawlins, messalina, poeticall varieties, a pill to purge melancholy, youths figaries. James Shirley: london, merchant taylors' school, st john's college, william laud, the triumph of peace, hyde park, the ball, the lady of pleasure.
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
James Shirley
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Jordan: Joy, Sensuality, Irony. James Shirley: Sorrow, Irony, Despair.