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.
Thomas d'Urfey
Thomas Jordan
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Thomas d’Urfey, born about 1653 and dead on 26 February 1723, was one of the most tireless entertainers in English literary history: a playwright, lyricist, ballad-writer, compiler, performer, political satirist, and convivial public personality whose career stretched from the high Restoration of Charles II to the early Hanoverian age. He has seldom occupied the first rank in conventional histories of English literat…
“The town may da-da-damn me as a poet, but they sing my songs for all that.”
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…
About 197 km separate Devon, England from Eynsham, Oxfordshire, England. Both have ground in London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Thomas d'Urfey: exeter, charles ii, james butler, the siege of memphis, madam fickle, a fond husband, squire oldsapp, the comical history of don quixote. Thomas Jordan: seventeenth-century london, city poet, lord mayor's show, thomas rawlins, messalina, poeticall varieties, a pill to purge melancholy, youths figaries.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Thomas d'Urfey: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder. Thomas Jordan: Joy, Sensuality, Irony.
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