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
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.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 71%
Poems 83%
Blended 76%
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
Richard Jago
Mark Akenside
1715
1781
They overlapped for 50 years (1721–1770).
When Mark Akenside was born, Richard Jago was about 6.
Richard Jago was about 55 when Mark Akenside died.
On the map
About 298 km separate Beaudesert, Warwickshire, 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
From the biographies
eighteenth
Richard Jago: warwickshire, edge-hill, the blackbirds, william shenstone, reverend richard jago, physico-theology, solihull school, snitterfield. 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.
Richard Jago
Mark Akenside
Emotional landscapes
Richard Jago: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy.