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
George Darley
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 78%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
George Darley was born in Dublin in December 1795 and died in London on 23 November 1846. He belongs among those gifted nineteenth-century writers whose lives complicate the comforting assumption that talent naturally finds its public. During his lifetime he was respected by a small number of discerning contemporaries, employed steadily enough in literary and educational work, and capable of producing poetry of extra…
“Fashionability is a kind of elevated vulgarity.”
In time
Charles Webbe
George Darley
1650
1846
Their lives did not overlap.
115 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 482 km separate Sidcup, London, England from Dublin, Ireland. Both have ground in London.
George Darley
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. George Darley: london, nepenthe, the errors of ecstasie, sylvia; or, the may queen, trinity college dublin, arthur darley, charles lamb, romantic literature.
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
George Darley
Emotional landscapes
Charles Webbe: Longing, Despair, Sorrow. George Darley: Despair, Sorrow, Wonder.