Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow, was born on 10 June 1781 in the Temple, London, and died at Brighton on 4 June 1829, six days before his forty-eighth birthday. He lived during one of the most turbulent and brilliant eras in English literary history: the age of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Regency, and the flowering of Romantic poetry. Yet he occupied an unusual position within that age…
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
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
Poet B
Richard Barnefield
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 75%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Richard Barnefield, baptized on 29 June 1574 and buried in 1627, occupies a small but remarkably provocative place in the history of English Renaissance poetry. He was not among the most prolific writers of the Elizabethan age, nor did he sustain a public literary career over decades as Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, or William Shakespeare did. Yet the poems he published during a brief period in the 1590s have continued…
“Small is the gift, but great is my good-will; the which, by how much the lesse I am able to expresse it, by so much the more it is infinite.”
In time
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
Richard Barnefield
1574
1829
Their lives did not overlap.
154 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 209 km separate Westminster, London, England from Norbury, Staffordshire, England. Both have ground in England.
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
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
desire
Edward Hovell-Thurlow: temple, london, brighton, second baron thurlow, thomas thurlow, anne bere, edward thurlow, charterhouse school, magdalen college, oxford. Richard Barnefield: staffordshire, norbury, the affectionate shepherd, cynthia, the legend of cassandra, oxford, brasnose college, male beauty.
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
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
Richard Barnefield
1592
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
Edward Hovell-Thurlow: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness. Richard Barnefield: Sensuality, Longing, Wonder.