Richard Jago, born on 1 October 1715 and dead on 8 May 1781, belonged to that abundant but often underappreciated company of eighteenth-century English writers whose poetry grew from local attachment, clerical discipline, sociability, and an attentive love of the natural world. He was never a literary revolutionary, nor did he seek the metropolitan celebrity attained by Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, or his friend D…
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
Richard Jago
Poet B
Yosa Buson
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 59%
Blended 59%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Yosa Buson, born in 1716 and dead on 17 January 1784, occupies a singular place in Japanese culture: he was at once one of the supreme masters of haiku, a major painter of the Edo period, an editor and teacher, a student of literary history, and a deliberate maker of artistic personae. Along with Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa, he is regularly named among the three greatest poets of the classical haiku tradition. Su…
“Haikai values the use of common language yet departing from the common. To depart from the common while still using the common: the method of departure from the common is most difficult.”
In time
Richard Jago
Yosa Buson
1715
1784
They overlapped for 66 years (1716–1781).
When Yosa Buson was born, Richard Jago was about 1.
Yosa Buson was about 65 when Richard Jago died.
On the map
About 9,490 km separate Beaudesert, Warwickshire, England from Kema, Settsu Province, Japan. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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
Richard Jago only
From the biographies
Richard Jago: warwickshire, edge-hill, the blackbirds, william shenstone, reverend richard jago, physico-theology, solihull school, snitterfield. Yosa Buson: settsu province, kema, tokugawa shogunate, matsuo bashō, kobayashi issa, hayano hajin, bunjin, nanga.
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.
Richard Jago
Emotional landscapes
Richard Jago: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Yosa Buson: Peace, Joy, Tenderness.