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
Jasper Mayne
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.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 76%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Jasper Mayne, born on 23 November 1604 and dead on 6 December 1672, lived at the intersection of several worlds that seventeenth-century England often tried to keep apart: the theatre and the pulpit, academic wit and ecclesiastical authority, royalist loyalty and the practical necessities of survival under a hostile regime. He was never a poet of the first rank, nor a dramatist whose name became inseparable from an a…
In time
Thomas Jordan
Jasper Mayne
1604
1685
They overlapped for 61 years (1612–1672).
When Thomas Jordan was born, Jasper Mayne was about 8.
Thomas Jordan was about 60 when Jasper Mayne died.
On the map
About 215 km separate Eynsham, Oxfordshire, England from Hatherleigh, Devon, England. 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.
Shared
From the biographies
royalist
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. Jasper Mayne: hatherleigh, westminster school, christ church oxford, brian duppa, the city match, the amorous war, cavalier poetry, caroline culture.
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
Jasper Mayne
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Jordan: Joy, Sensuality, Irony. Jasper Mayne: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.