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
Christopher Smart
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 72%
Blended 72%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Christopher Smart was born on 11 April 1722 at Fairlawne, the estate near Shipbourne in Kent where his father, Peter Smart, worked as steward to the Vane family. He died on 21 May 1771, not 1770 as has sometimes been reported, in London after a life marked by extraordinary accomplishment, recurrent distress, financial insecurity, and long periods of confinement. Few English poets of the eighteenth century have seemed…
“For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.”
In time
Matthew Prior
Christopher Smart
1664
1770
Their lives did not overlap.
1 year separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 166 km separate Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England from Shipbourne, Kent, England. Both have ground in England.
Matthew Prior
Christopher Smart
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
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. Christopher Smart: fairlawne, shipbourne, peter smart, winifred griffiths smart, durham school, pembroke college, john newbery, mrs. mary midnight.
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
Matthew Prior
1701
First Published Poem
Christopher Smart
Emotional landscapes
Matthew Prior: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Christopher Smart: Wonder, Tenderness, Joy.