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
Alexander Brome
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.”
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…
About 75 km separate Devon, England from Evershot, Dorset, 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. Alexander Brome: royalist, london, dorset, the cunning lovers, english anacreon, civil war, satirical verse, wine.
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. Alexander Brome: Joy, Irony, Tenderness.
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