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
Mary Monck
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 66%
Blended 66%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Mary Monck, born Mary Molesworth about 1677 and dead in 1715, belongs to that important company of early modern women poets whose achievement was more substantial than their later reputation long allowed. She wrote at the meeting point of Restoration wit, Augustan order, religious meditation, private elegy, and the expanding culture of literary translation. Her surviving work is not vast, and its circumstances of pre…
In time
Thomas Flatman
Mary Monck
1635
1715
They overlapped for 12 years (1677–1688).
When Mary Monck was born, Thomas Flatman was about 42.
Mary Monck was about 11 when Thomas Flatman died.
On the map
About 471 km separate Deptford, London, England from Dublin, Ireland. 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
social
Thomas Flatman: london, aldersgate street, three-leg alley, winchester college, new college oxford, royalist, anglican, poems and songs. Mary Monck: anglo-irish society, robert molesworth, letitia coote, george monck, verses wrote on her death-bed at bath, restoration wit, augustan order, literary translation.
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
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Thomas Flatman
Emotional landscapes
Thomas Flatman: Sorrow, Despair, Fear. Mary Monck: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing.