Alexander Brome, born in 1620 and dead on 30 June 1666, belongs to that lively but unevenly remembered company of seventeenth-century English writers whose poems were made for circulation, sociability, controversy, and song. He was a lawyer by profession, a Royalist by conviction, an editor and occasional dramatist by literary activity, and, above all, a writer of satirical and convivial verse. His name is not common…
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
Alexander Brome
Poet B
Ben Jonson
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 73%
Poems 80%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Ben Jonson, baptized on 11 June 1572 and probably born on or very near that date, entered the world in Westminster at a moment when London’s theatrical culture was beginning to assume the force and richness that would make the English Renaissance famous. He died on 6 August 1637, having become, in the course of sixty-five turbulent years, England’s most formidable classical dramatist, one of its finest lyric poets, a…
“Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.”
In time
Alexander Brome
Ben Jonson
1572
1666
They overlapped for 18 years (1620–1637).
When Alexander Brome was born, Ben Jonson was about 48.
Alexander Brome was about 17 when Ben Jonson died.
On the map
About 188 km separate Evershot, Dorset, England from Westminster, London, England. Both have ground in London.
Alexander Brome
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
Alexander Brome: royalist, london, dorset, the cunning lovers, english anacreon, civil war, satirical verse, wine. Ben Jonson: westminster, william camden, on my first son, on my first daughter, every man in his humour, the isle of dogs, gabriel spencer, war of the theatres.
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.
Alexander Brome
Ben Jonson
Emotional landscapes
Alexander Brome: Joy, Irony, Tenderness. Ben Jonson: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality.