Thomas Flatman was born on 21 February 1635 in London, probably in or near Aldersgate Street, though older accounts also associate his family with Red Cross Street. He died on 8 December 1688 in Three-leg Alley, in the parish of St. Bride’s, London, and was buried there. His name is not usually placed beside those of John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, or the Earl of Rochester, yet Flatman is an unusually revea…
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
Thomas Flatman
Poet B
A.E.Housman
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 72%
Poems 87%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation. The apparent contrast between these identities has long fascinated reade…
“Curiosity, the desire to know things as they are, is a craving no less native to the being of man than the craving for food and drink.”
In time
Thomas Flatman
A.E.Housman
1635
1936
Their lives did not overlap.
171 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 172 km separate Deptford, London, England from Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Thomas Flatman
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
Thomas Flatman only
From the biographies
Thomas Flatman: london, aldersgate street, three-leg alley, winchester college, new college oxford, royalist, anglican, poems and songs. A.E.Housman: fockbury, bromsgrove, moses jackson, a shropshire lad, loveliest of trees, to an athlete dying young, when i was one-and-twenty, classical scholar.
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
Thomas Flatman
A.E.Housman
1894
Death of his Father
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Flatman: Sorrow, Despair, Fear. A.E.Housman: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.