John Kenyon, born on 2 December 1784 in Trelawny Parish, Jamaica, and dead on 3 December 1856 at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, was a minor poet of the Romantic and early Victorian periods but a major presence in the social history of English literature. His own poems, polished, conscientious, and occasionally touching, have never commanded the attention given to the work of his celebrated friends. Yet Kenyon’s life mat…
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
John Kenyon
Poet B
Barry Cornwall
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 76%
Blended 76%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Bryan Waller Procter, known to generations of readers by the literary name Barry Cornwall, was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on 21 November 1787, and died in London on 5 October 1874. He belonged to that broad, fascinating company of early nineteenth-century writers who stood close to the great Romantic generation without ever wholly entering its innermost circle. He was not a poet of Byron’s volcanic self-dramatization,…
“The schoolmaster is generally a compound of the martyr and the tyrant.”
In time
John Kenyon
Barry Cornwall
1784
1874
They overlapped for 70 years (1787–1856).
When Barry Cornwall was born, John Kenyon was about 3.
Barry Cornwall was about 69 when John Kenyon died.
On the map
About 7,460 km separate Trelawny, Jamaica from Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Both have ground in England.
Barry Cornwall
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
social
John Kenyon: trelawny parish, jamaica, isle of wight, samuel taylor coleridge, william wordsworth, elizabeth barrett browning, robert browning, a rhymed plea for tolerance. Barry Cornwall: leeds, charles lamb, adelaide anne procter, dramatic scenes and other poems, the life of edmund kean, english songs, the sea, touch us gently, time!.
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.
John Kenyon
Barry Cornwall
1810
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
John Kenyon: Joy, Sensuality, Wonder. Barry Cornwall: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness.