In the grand tapestry of English Renaissance literature, certain figures shine with the brilliant intensity of supernovae, their light reaching across centuries with undiminished power. Others burn with a steadier, more contemplative flame, their contributions no less significant but perhaps more subtle in their enduring influence. Samuel Daniel belongs decidedly to this latter category—a poet whose measured verse an…
“Methinks we should not so soon yield our consents captive to the authority of antiquity, unless we saw more reason.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was born on 12 April 1550 at Castle Hedingham in Essex and died on 24 June 1604. He belongs to the most vivid and difficult company of Elizabethan figures: a hereditary magnate with a celebrated name, a cultivated courtier, a patron of writers and players, a surviving lyric poet of real accomplishment, an erratic spendthrift, and, in later centuries, the center of a remarka…
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Anger, Sorrow
