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
Thomas Carew
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 79%
Poems 89%
Blended 83%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Thomas Carew, born in 1595 and buried on 22 March 1640, occupies a distinctive place in English poetry as one of the most accomplished voices of the Caroline court. He is usually grouped with the Cavalier poets, a loose modern designation for writers associated with the court of Charles I, with royalist culture, and with an ideal of elegance, loyalty, sociability, erotic wit, and cultivated pleasure. Yet Carew is mor…
“Though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seems he had not read the Ethics, which, among other Precepts of Morality, forbid Self-commendation.”
In time
Charles Webbe
Thomas Carew
1595
1680
Their lives did not overlap.
10 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 11 km separate Sidcup, London, England from West Wickham, Kent, England. Both have ground in London.
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
culture
court
Charles Webbe: restoration poetry, more love or more disdain, against indifference, emotional extremity, thirty years' war, commonwealth and protectorate, charles ii, henry purcell. Thomas Carew: caroline court, cavalier poets, ben jonson, to his inconstant mistress, the spring, a rapture, sir dudley carleton, venice.
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
Thomas Carew
1613
Embassy to Venice
Emotional landscapes
Charles Webbe: Longing, Despair, Sorrow. Thomas Carew: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness.