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
Tobias George Smollett
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
Tobias George Smollett, baptized on 19 March 1721 and generally believed to have been born shortly before that date, was one of the most forceful, combative, and variously gifted writers of eighteenth-century Britain. He died on 17 September 1771, only about fifty years old, yet in that compressed lifetime he became a surgeon, naval observer, playwright, poet, translator, journalist, editor, political polemicist, his…
“Writing is all a lottery — I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.”
In time
Richard Jago
Tobias George Smollett
1715
1781
They overlapped for 51 years (1721–1771).
When Tobias George Smollett was born, Richard Jago was about 6.
Richard Jago was about 56 when Tobias George Smollett died.
On the map
About 448 km separate Beaudesert, Warwickshire, England from Dalquhurn, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland. Both have ground in London.
Tobias George Smollett
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. Tobias George Smollett: dalquhurn, vale of leven, dumbartonshire, the regicide, the tears of scotland, the adventures of roderick random, the adventures of peregrine pickle, hms chichester.
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
Tobias George Smollett
1739
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
Richard Jago: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow. Tobias George Smollett: Peace, Joy, Tenderness.