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.
John Sheffield
Edward de Vere
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
John Sheffield, who became the first Duke of Buckingham and Normanby, lived from 8 September 1647 to 24 February 1721, though older records occasionally create uncertainty about dates because of the calendar conventions and genealogical habits of the period. He was a nobleman, naval officer, soldier, courtier, politician, patron, critic, playwright, memoirist, and poet. Such a catalogue of roles can make him seem les…
“Often for the king, always for the public good.”
Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was born on 12 April 1550 at Castle Hedingham in Essex and died on 24 June 1604. He belongs to the most vivid and difficult company of Elizabethan figures: a hereditary magnate with a celebrated name, a cultivated courtier, a patron of writers and players, a surviving lyric poet of real accomplishment, an erratic spendthrift, and, in later centuries, the center of a remarka…
About 75 km separate London, England from Castle Hedingham, Essex, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
John Sheffield: first duke of buckingham, naval officer, battle of solebay, order of the garter, essay on satire, an essay upon poetry, restoration england, james duke of york. Edward de Vere: castle hedingham, seventeenth earl of oxford, anne cecil, sir william cecil, the paradise of dainty devices, the phoenix nest, if women could be fair and yet not fond, the labouring man that tills the fertile soil.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
John Sheffield: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Edward de Vere: Irony, Anger, Sorrow.
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