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
Richard Barnefield
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 74%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Richard Barnefield, baptized on 29 June 1574 and buried in 1627, occupies a small but remarkably provocative place in the history of English Renaissance poetry. He was not among the most prolific writers of the Elizabethan age, nor did he sustain a public literary career over decades as Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, or William Shakespeare did. Yet the poems he published during a brief period in the 1590s have continued…
“This protestation (I hope) will satisfie th' indifferent: and as for them that are maliciously enuious, as I cannot, so I care not to please.”
In time
Alexander Brome
Richard Barnefield
1574
1666
They overlapped for 8 years (1620–1627).
When Alexander Brome was born, Richard Barnefield was about 46.
Alexander Brome was about 7 when Richard Barnefield died.
On the map
About 219 km separate Evershot, Dorset, England from Norbury, Staffordshire, England. Both have ground in England.
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
Alexander Brome: royalist, london, dorset, the cunning lovers, english anacreon, civil war, satirical verse, wine. Richard Barnefield: staffordshire, norbury, the affectionate shepherd, cynthia, the legend of cassandra, oxford, brasnose college, male beauty.
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
Richard Barnefield
1592
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
Alexander Brome: Joy, Irony, Tenderness. Richard Barnefield: Sensuality, Longing, Wonder.