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…
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
Mark Akenside
Poet B
William Broome
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 70%
Blended 70%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Broome was born on 30 April 1689 and baptized three days later, on 3 May, at Haslington in Cheshire, near Crewe. He died at Bath on 16 November 1745. Although his name survives most readily in accounts of Alexander Pope’s Homer, Broome deserves attention as more than a subordinate craftsman in a famous enterprise. He was a clergyman, classicist, translator, occasional poet, schoolmaster, and ambitious partici…
“I prefix your Name to the following Poem, as a Monument of the long, and sincere Friendship I have born you: I am sensible you are too good a Judge of Poetry to approve it; however it will be a Testimony of my Respect.”
In time
Mark Akenside
William Broome
1689
1770
They overlapped for 25 years (1721–1745).
When Mark Akenside was born, William Broome was about 32.
Mark Akenside was about 24 when William Broome died.
On the map
About 214 km separate Newcastle upon Tyne, England from Haslington, Cheshire, 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
Mark Akenside only
From the biographies
eighteenth
Mark Akenside: newcastle upon tyne, the pleasures of imagination, robert dodsley, joseph addison, philip doddridge, blank verse, enlightenment, whig. William Broome: haslington, cheshire, bath, alexander pope, iliad, odyssey, elijah fenton, charles cornwallis.
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.
Mark Akenside
William Broome
Emotional landscapes
Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy. William Broome: Sorrow, Despair, Tenderness.