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 Fletcher
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 69%
Blended 69%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Fletcher, baptized on 20 December 1579 and buried on 29 August 1625, was one of the most successful, inventive, and influential dramatists of England’s Jacobean age. Though he is now less familiar to general readers than William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, or Christopher Marlowe, Fletcher was for generations among the most frequently performed writers in the English language. In the decades after his death, audienc…
“Thus much I hope will serve to justify my poem, and make you understand it; to teach you more for nothing, I do not know that I am in conscience bound.”
In time
Thomas Jordan
John Fletcher
1579
1685
They overlapped for 14 years (1612–1625).
When Thomas Jordan was born, John Fletcher was about 33.
Thomas Jordan was about 13 when John Fletcher died.
On the map
About 168 km separate Eynsham, Oxfordshire, England from Wittersham, Kent, 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.
John Fletcher only
From the biographies
london
Thomas Jordan: seventeenth-century london, city poet, lord mayor's show, thomas rawlins, messalina, poeticall varieties, a pill to purge melancholy, youths figaries. John Fletcher: rye, sussex, francis beaumont, the faithful shepherdess, philaster, the maid's tragedy, a king and no king, tragicomedy.
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
John Fletcher
1600
Move to London
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Jordan: Joy, Sensuality, Irony. John Fletcher: Sorrow, Peace, Despair.