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
Charles Tennyson Turner
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 74%
Poems 85%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Charles Tennyson Turner was born Charles Turner on 4 July 1808 at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire, and died on 25 April 1879 at Grasby, also in Lincolnshire. He lived during the long Victorian transformation of English literary culture, yet his own life retained a strongly local character: he was a country clergyman, a husband, a brother in an unusually gifted family, and a poet whose finest achievements were small…
“You cannot well say a thing ‘sounds’ the ocean, except a plummet; or ‘sounds the harp,’ except the fingers of a musician.”
In time
Thomas Flatman
Charles Tennyson Turner
1635
1879
Their lives did not overlap.
120 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 196 km separate Deptford, London, England from Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Thomas Flatman
Charles Tennyson Turner
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. Charles Tennyson Turner: somersby rectory, lincolnshire, alfred tennyson, frederick tennyson, poems by two brothers, trinity college cambridge, vicar of grasby, louisa sellwood.
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
Charles Tennyson Turner
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Flatman: Sorrow, Despair, Fear. Charles Tennyson Turner: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness.