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
Mark Akenside
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 71%
Poems 88%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Mark Akenside was born on 9 November 1721 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and died in London on 23 June 1770. He was one of the most ambitious English poets of the mid-eighteenth century: a physician of substantial professional distinction, a political partisan, a learned student of philosophy and natural science, and the author of The Pleasures of Imagination, a poem that sought nothing less than to explain how the mind rec…
In time
Charles Webbe
Mark Akenside
1650
1770
Their lives did not overlap.
41 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 411 km separate Sidcup, London, England from Newcastle upon Tyne, 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
Charles Webbe only
From the biographies
Charles Webbe: restoration poetry, more love or more disdain, against indifference, emotional extremity, thirty years' war, commonwealth and protectorate, charles ii, henry purcell. Mark Akenside: newcastle upon tyne, the pleasures of imagination, robert dodsley, joseph addison, philip doddridge, blank verse, enlightenment, whig.
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
Mark Akenside
Emotional landscapes
Charles Webbe: Longing, Despair, Sorrow. Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy.