There is a peculiar pleasure in discovering a poet who has been, as it were, mislaid by history. Matthew Prior occupies precisely this position: celebrated in his own lifetime as one of England's finest wits, admired by Swift and Pope, fêted at the courts of Europe, and yet today known only to specialists and to those who have the good fortune to stumble across his poems in some dusty anthology. To read Prior is to e…
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
Matthew Prior
Poet B
Thomas Parnell
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 81%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Thomas Parnell, born in Dublin on 11 September 1679 and dead at Chester, England, on 24 October 1718, occupies a distinctive position in the literary culture of the early eighteenth century. He was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, poet, translator, essayist, and valued member of the brilliant circle that included Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot. His name is often introduced through those greater…
“Our defects and follies are too often unknown to us; nay, they are so far from being known to us, that they pass for demonstrations of our worth.”
In time
Matthew Prior
Thomas Parnell
1664
1721
They overlapped for 40 years (1679–1718).
When Thomas Parnell was born, Matthew Prior was about 15.
Matthew Prior was about 54 when Thomas Parnell died.
On the map
About 407 km separate Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England from Dublin, Ireland. Both have ground in England.
Matthew Prior
Thomas Parnell
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
Matthew Prior only
From the biographies
eighteenth
Matthew Prior: wimborne minster, charles sackville, the hind and the panther transvers'd, treaty of utrecht, richard busby, st john's college, mock-heroic verse, solomon on the vanity of the world. Thomas Parnell: chester, anglo-irish, trinity college dublin, the hermit, a night-piece on death, scriblerus club, anne minchin, robert harley.
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.
1694
Matsuo Bashō dies
Matthew Prior
1701
First Published Poem
Thomas Parnell
Emotional landscapes
Matthew Prior: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Thomas Parnell: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality.