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
Ralph Hodgson
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 83%
Blended 77%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Ralph Hodgson was born on 9 September 1871 in Darlington, County Durham, and died on 3 November 1962 in Minerva, Ohio. His life traversed an astonishing stretch of history: the late Victorian industrial world, the upheaval of two world wars, the flowering and fragmentation of literary modernism, and the gradual emergence of a more public consciousness about animals and the natural environment. Yet his poetry seems to…
“Did anyone ever have a boring dream?”
In time
Richard Jago
Ralph Hodgson
1715
1962
Their lives did not overlap.
90 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 278 km separate Beaudesert, Warwickshire, England from Darlington, County Durham, England. Both have ground in England.
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. Ralph Hodgson: darlington, minerva, ohio, the bull, the last blackbird, poems, the song of honour, eve, time, you old gipsy man.
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
Richard Jago
Emotional landscapes
Richard Jago: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Ralph Hodgson: Wonder, Tenderness, Joy.