Charles Webbe, whose life is usually dated approximately from 1650 to about 1680, occupies a small but intriguing place in the history of English Restoration poetry. He is remembered less through a substantial published body of work than through a handful of lyrics and, above all, through the persistent afterlife of one forceful poem of love and emotional extremity. The uncertainty surrounding even the spelling of hi…
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
Charles Webbe
Poet B
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
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 76%
Poems 89%
Blended 82%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…
“They are therefore essentially thoughts in marble, or poems of form.”
In time
Charles Webbe
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
1650
1881
Their lives did not overlap.
164 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 30 km separate Sidcup, London, England from Ealing, London, England. Both have ground in London and England.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
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
Charles Webbe only
From the biographies
music
Charles Webbe: restoration poetry, more love or more disdain, against indifference, emotional extremity, thirty years' war, commonwealth and protectorate, charles ii, henry purcell. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston.
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
Charles Webbe
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Emotional landscapes
Charles Webbe: Longing, Despair, Sorrow. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.