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
Laurence Binyon
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 73%
Poems 86%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…
“It is within humanity, not outside it, that we must seek for the authority of art.”
In time
Thomas Flatman
Laurence Binyon
1635
1943
Their lives did not overlap.
181 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 342 km separate Deptford, London, England from Lancaster, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Thomas Flatman
Laurence Binyon
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. Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon.
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
Laurence Binyon
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Flatman: Sorrow, Despair, Fear. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.