Fanny Greville, born Frances Macartney about 1724 and dead on 28 July 1789, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in eighteenth-century English poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a small number of poems, above all “A Prayer for Indifference,” rather than on a large published oeuvre or a public literary career of the sort enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Yet the very modesty of her exta…
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
Fanny Greville
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 56%
Blended 56%
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
Fanny Greville
William Broome
1689
1789
They overlapped for 22 years (1724–1745).
When Fanny Greville was born, William Broome was about 35.
Fanny Greville was about 21 when William Broome died.
On the map
About 98 km separate England from Haslington, Cheshire, England. Both have ground in England and London.
Fanny Greville
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.
From the biographies
social
eighteenth
Fanny Greville: county tyrone, anglo-irish, fulke greville, a prayer for indifference, the court of death, samuel johnson, eighteenth-century poetry, culture of sensibility. 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.
Fanny Greville
1785
Relocation to Bath
William Broome
Emotional landscapes
Fanny Greville: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. William Broome: Sorrow, Despair, Tenderness.