Charles Wesley was born on 18 December 1707 at Epworth, Lincolnshire, into a household that was at once crowded, precarious, intellectually ambitious, and intensely religious. He was the eighteenth child of Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, and Susanna Wesley, whose formidable discipline and devotional intelligence made her one of the great formative presences in the history of English Methodism. Nineteen children we…
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
Charles Wesley
Poet B
Mark Akenside
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 58%
Blended 58%
Swap sides
Another related pair
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…
In time
Charles Wesley
Mark Akenside
1707
1788
They overlapped for 50 years (1721–1770).
When Mark Akenside was born, Charles Wesley was about 14.
Charles Wesley was about 63 when Mark Akenside died.
On the map
About 169 km separate Epworth, Lincolnshire, England from Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Both have ground in England and London.
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
Charles Wesley only
Mark Akenside only
From the biographies
eighteenth
Charles Wesley: epworth, lincolnshire, john wesley, george whitefield, methodism, hymns and sacred poems, o for a thousand tongues to sing, fort frederica. Mark Akenside: newcastle upon tyne, the pleasures of imagination, robert dodsley, joseph addison, philip doddridge, blank verse, enlightenment, whig.
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.
Charles Wesley
Mark Akenside
Emotional landscapes
Charles Wesley: Spirituality, Peace, Joy. Mark Akenside: Longing, Sorrow, Irony.