Joshua Sylvester, born in 1563 and dead on 28 September 1618, occupied an unusual and important place in the literary culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He was neither a university poet in the manner of many learned writers nor a wholly court-dependent figure; he was a merchant, a translator, a religious poet, a public panegyrist, a husband and father, and, for a time, a servant of the royal household. His…
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
Joshua Sylvester
Poet B
Francis Quarles
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 74%
Blended 74%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Francis Quarles, baptized on 8 May 1592 and buried on 8 September 1644, was among the most widely read English devotional poets of the seventeenth century. In his own lifetime and for many generations afterward, his name was familiar in households that might never have owned the works of John Donne, George Herbert, or John Milton. His poetry was not designed chiefly for fashionable literary circles. It sought instead…
“Be not too much in love with thine own opinions.”
In time
Joshua Sylvester
Francis Quarles
1563
1644
They overlapped for 27 years (1592–1618).
When Francis Quarles was born, Joshua Sylvester was about 29.
Francis Quarles was about 26 when Joshua Sylvester died.
On the map
About 86 km separate Kent, England from Stratford, Essex, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Joshua Sylvester
Francis Quarles
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
religious
protestant
devotional
biblical
Joshua Sylvester: merchant adventurer, guillaume de salluste, du bartas, divine weekes and workes, henry iv of france, adrian à saravia, william plumbe, protestant culture. Francis Quarles: essex, romford, christ's college cambridge, ursula woodgate, a feast for wormes, hadassa, job militant, sion's elegies.
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.
1595
Execution at Tyburn
Joshua Sylvester
Francis Quarles
1644
Final Years in Exile
Emotional landscapes
Joshua Sylvester: Tenderness, Longing, Spirituality. Francis Quarles: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.