Charles Cotton was born on 28 April 1630 at Beresford Hall, near Alstonefield, on the Staffordshire side of the Peak District, and died in London on 16 February 1687. He belonged to that striking generation of English writers whose lives were shaped by civil war, regicide, Restoration, religious division, and the gradual reorganization of literary culture around print, patronage, and metropolitan fashion. Yet Cotton’…
“Though fools spurn Hymen's gentle powers, we, who improve his golden hours, by sweet experience know that marriage, rightly understood, gives to the tender and the good a paradise below.”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Light Verse Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
There is a peculiar pleasure in discovering a poet who has been, as it were, mislaid by history. Matthew Prior occupies precisely this position: celebrated in his own lifetime as one of England's finest wits, admired by Swift and Pope, fêted at the courts of Europe, and yet today known only to specialists and to those who have the good fortune to stumble across his poems in some dusty anthology. To read Prior is to e…
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
