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
Alexander Brome
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 77%
Poems 79%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
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…
In time
Charles Webbe
Alexander Brome
1620
1680
They overlapped for 17 years (1650–1666).
When Charles Webbe was born, Alexander Brome was about 30.
Charles Webbe was about 16 when Alexander Brome died.
On the map
About 200 km separate Sidcup, London, England from Evershot, Dorset, England. Both have ground in London and England.
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
restoration
culture
songs
Charles Webbe: restoration poetry, more love or more disdain, against indifference, emotional extremity, thirty years' war, commonwealth and protectorate, charles ii, henry purcell. Alexander Brome: royalist, london, dorset, the cunning lovers, english anacreon, civil war, satirical verse, wine.
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.
1650
Battle of Dunbar
1651
Battle of Worcester
Charles Webbe
Alexander Brome
Emotional landscapes
Charles Webbe: Longing, Despair, Sorrow. Alexander Brome: Joy, Irony, Tenderness.