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
William Strode
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 73%
Blended 73%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Strode, baptized on 11 January 1602/3 and dead by 1645, belonged to that abundant but still partly shadowed generation of English writers who made the early seventeenth century one of the most inventive periods in the history of English poetry. He was a clergyman, Oxford academic, university orator, court entertainer, dramatist, and lyric poet. In each role he displayed verbal ease, learning, and an appetite…
In time
Thomas Jordan
William Strode
1602
1685
They overlapped for 34 years (1612–1645).
When Thomas Jordan was born, William Strode was about 10.
Thomas Jordan was about 33 when William Strode died.
On the map
About 239 km separate Eynsham, Oxfordshire, England from Plymouth, 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
Thomas Jordan: seventeenth-century london, city poet, lord mayor's show, thomas rawlins, messalina, poeticall varieties, a pill to purge melancholy, youths figaries. William Strode: devonshire gentry, william laud, christ church oxford, the floating island, richard corbet, public orator, caroline manuscript verse, royalist.
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. William Strode: Tenderness, Wonder, Sorrow.