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 Gay
Mark Akenside
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 Gay, born on 30 June 1685 in Barnstaple, Devon, and dead in London on 4 December 1732, occupies a distinctive place in the literature of the early eighteenth century. He was a poet, dramatist, librettist, fabulist, journalist, and observer of urban life, but none of these labels fully contains him. His greatest achievement, The Beggar’s Opera, changed the history of English theatre by making songs familiar to or…
“While there is life there's hope.”
Mark Akenside was born on 9 November 1721 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and died in London on 23 June 1770. He was one of the most ambitious English poets of the mid-eighteenth century: a physician of substantial professional distinction, a political partisan, a learned student of philosophy and natural science, and the author of The Pleasures of Imagination, a poem that sought nothing less than to explain how the mind rec…
About 463 km separate Barnstaple, Devon, England from Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Both have ground in England and London.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
John Gay: barnstaple, the beggar's opera, alexander pope, jonathan swift, rural sports, the present state of wit, the wife of bath, the what d'ye call it. Mark Akenside: newcastle upon tyne, the pleasures of imagination, robert dodsley, joseph addison, philip doddridge, blank verse, enlightenment, whig.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
John Gay: Irony, Wonder, Tenderness. Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy.
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