Thomas d’Urfey, born about 1653 and dead on 26 February 1723, was one of the most tireless entertainers in English literary history: a playwright, lyricist, ballad-writer, compiler, performer, political satirist, and convivial public personality whose career stretched from the high Restoration of Charles II to the early Hanoverian age. He has seldom occupied the first rank in conventional histories of English literat…
“My good or ill stars ordained me to be a knight errant in the fairy fields of poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets, Poet-Musicians, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder
William Cartwright was born on 1 September 1611 at Northway, near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, and died at Oxford on 29 November 1643. His life was brief even by the precarious standards of the seventeenth century, but it was remarkably crowded: he was a poet, playwright, scholar, university teacher, Anglican clergyman, royalist, and celebrated preacher. To his contemporaries he seemed a figure of unusual promise,…
“it was his happiness that he neither heard nor read any thing vulgar, weak or raw, till his mind was fixed to notions exact as reason and as high as fancy”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
