John Ford, baptized on 17 April 1586 and last securely documented in 1639, was one of the most daring and emotionally penetrating dramatists of England’s late Renaissance. Although he is commonly remembered as a playwright rather than as a poet in the narrower sense, poetry is inseparable from his dramatic achievement. His finest plays are built from a grave, musical, concentrated blank verse that gives private suffe…
“A good life aims at another mark; for such men as endeavour to live well, live with an expectation of death, and they when they die, die to live, and live for ever.”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sorrow
Jasper Mayne, born on 23 November 1604 and dead on 6 December 1672, lived at the intersection of several worlds that seventeenth-century England often tried to keep apart: the theatre and the pulpit, academic wit and ecclesiastical authority, royalist loyalty and the practical necessities of survival under a hostile regime. He was never a poet of the first rank, nor a dramatist whose name became inseparable from an a…
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow
