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
John Bennet
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 63%
Blended 63%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Bennet, born probably around 1575 and last securely active in 1614, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in the cultural history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He is frequently described as a poet because his finest music is inseparable from the language it sets, but the surviving evidence identifies him principally as a composer: a writer of madrigals and psalm settings whose art depended upon an excep…
In time
Thomas Jordan
John Bennet
1575
1685
They overlapped for 3 years (1612–1614).
When Thomas Jordan was born, John Bennet was about 37.
Thomas Jordan was about 2 when John Bennet died.
On the map
About 231 km separate Eynsham, Oxfordshire, England from Blackburn, Lancashire. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
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
Thomas Jordan: seventeenth-century london, city poet, lord mayor's show, thomas rawlins, messalina, poeticall varieties, a pill to purge melancholy, youths figaries. John Bennet: elizabethan england, jacobean england, madrigals to foure voyces, weeping eyes, thomas morley, john wilbye, john dowland, ralph assheton.
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
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Jordan: Joy, Sensuality, Irony. John Bennet: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.