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Metaphysical Poetry
The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century attention established their importance. Given the lack of coherence as a movement, and the diversity of style among poets, it has been suggested that calling them Baroque poets after their era might be more useful. Once the Metaphysical style was established, however, it was occasionally adopted by other and especially younger poets to fit appropriate circumstances. Origin of the name In the chapter on Abraham Cowley in his ''Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets'' (1779–81), Samuel Johnson refers to the beginning of the 17th century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". ...
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Abraham Cowley By Sir Peter Lely
Abraham, ; ar, , , name=, group= (originally Abram) is the common Hebrew patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism, he is the founding father of the special relationship between the Jews and God; in Christianity, he is the spiritual progenitor of all believers, whether Jewish or non-Jewish; and in Islam, he is a link in the chain of Islamic prophets that begins with Adam (see Adam in Islam) and culminates in Muhammad. His life, told in the narrative of the Book of Genesis, revolves around the themes of posterity and land. Abraham is called by God to leave the house of his father Terah and settle in the land of Canaan, which God now promises to Abraham and his progeny. This promise is subsequently inherited by Isaac, Abraham's son by his wife Sarah, while Isaac's half-brother Ishmael is also promised that he will be the founder of a great nation. Abraham purchases a tomb (the Cave of the Patriarchs) at Hebron to ...
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Henry Vaughan
Henry Vaughan (17 April 1621 – 23 April 1695) was a Welsh metaphysical poet, author and translator writing in English, and a medical physician. His religious poetry appeared in ''Silex Scintillans'' in 1650, with a second part in 1655.''Oxford Companion to English Literature'', s. v. Henry Vaughan. In 1646 his ''Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished'' was published. Meanwhile he had been persuaded by reading the religious poet George Herbert to renounce "idle verse". The prose ''Mount of Olives'' and ''Solitary Devotions'' (1652) show his authenticity and depth of convictions. Two more volumes of secular verse followed, ostensibly without his sanction, but it is his religious verse that has been acclaimed. He also translated short moral and religious works and two medical works in prose. In the 1650s he began a lifelong medical practice. Early life Henry Vaughan was born at Newton by Usk in the Llansantffraed (St. Bridget's) parish of Brecknockshire, the eldest ...
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Vaughan Silex Scintillans
Vaughan () (2021 population 323,103) is a city in Ontario, Canada. It is located in the Regional Municipality of York, just north of Toronto. Vaughan was the fastest-growing municipality in Canada between 1996 and 2006 with its population increasing by 80.2% during this time period and having nearly doubled in population since 1991. It is the fifth-largest city in the Greater Toronto Area, and the 17th-largest city in Canada. Toponymy The township was named after Benjamin Vaughan, a British commissioner who signed a peace treaty with the United States in 1783. History In the late pre-contact period, the Huron-Wendat people populated what is today Vaughan. The Skandatut ancestral Wendat village overlooked the east branch of the Humber River (Pine Valley Drive) and was once home to approximately 2,000 Huron in the sixteenth century. The site is close to a Huron ossuary (mass grave) uncovered in Kleinburg in 1970, and one kilometre north of the Seed-Barker Huron site. The first ...
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Edward Taylor
Edward Taylor (1642 – June 29, 1729) was a colonial American poet, pastor and physician of English origin. His work remained unpublished for some 200 years but since then has established him as one of the foremost writers of his time. His poetry has been characterized as "American Baroque" as well as Metaphysical. Life The son of a nonconformist yeoman farmer, Taylor is thought to have been born in 1642 at Sketchley, Leicestershire. There is conflicting evidence in regard to the dates and locations of events in his early life, but he grew up during the Commonwealth of England and under the influence of his father became a convinced Protestant Dissenter. His childhood was spent on the family farm where he enjoyed the stability of a middle-class upbringing. His later writings are full of influences from his farmhouse childhood, both as regards imagery, and in the occasional use of the Leicestershire dialect. Taylor's mother and father died in 1657 and 1658, respectively. He c ...
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Thomas Traherne
Thomas Traherne (; 1636 or 1637) was an English poet, Anglican cleric, theologian, and religious writer. The intense, scholarly spirituality in his writings has led to his being commemorated by some parts of the Anglican Communion on 10 October (the anniversary of his burial in 1674) or on 27 September. The work for which Traherne is best known today is the ''Centuries of Meditations'', a collection of short paragraphs in which he reflects on Christian life and ministry, philosophy, happiness, desire and childhood. This was first published in 1908 after having been rediscovered in manuscript ten years earlier. His poetry likewise was first published in 1903 and 1910 (''The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, B.D.'' and ''Poems of Felicity''). His prose works include ''Roman Forgeries'' (1673), ''Christian Ethics'' (1675), and ''A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God'' (1699). Traherne's writings frequently explore the glory of creation and what he saw as h ...
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John Norris (philosopher)
John Norris, sometimes called John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1712), was an English theologian, philosopher and poet associated with the Cambridge Platonists. Life John Norris was born at Collingbourne Kingston, Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester School, and Exeter College, Oxford, gaining a B.A. in 1680. He was later appointed a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (M.A. 1684). He lived a quiet life as a country parson and thinker at Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton, Wiltshire, from 1692 until his death early in 1712. Works In philosophy he was a Platonist and mystic. He became an early opponent of John Locke, whose ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' (1690) he attacked in ''Christian Blessedness or Discourses upon the Beatitudes'' in the same year; he also combatted Locke's theories in his ''Essay toward the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World'' (1701–4). He attacked religious schism in ''Christian Blessedness'' and ''The Charge of Schism, Continued.' ...
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John Wilmot, 2nd Earl Of Rochester
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1 April 1647 – 26 July 1680) was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II's Restoration court. The Restoration reacted against the "spiritual authoritarianism" of the Puritan era. Rochester embodied this new era, and he became as well known for his rakish lifestyle as for his poetry, although the two were often interlinked. He died as a result of venereal disease at the age of 33. Rochester was described by his contemporary Andrew Marvell as "the best English satirist," and he is generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the Restoration wits. His poetry was widely censored during the Victorian era, but enjoyed a revival from the 1920s onwards, with reappraisals from noted literary figures such as Graham Greene and Ezra Pound. The critic Vivian de Sola Pinto linked Rochester's libertinism to Hobbesian materialism. During his lifetime, Rochester was best known for ''A Satyr Against Reason and ...
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Edmund Waller
Edmund Waller, FRS (3 March 1606 – 21 October 1687) was an English poet and politician who was Member of Parliament for various constituencies between 1624 and 1687, and one of the longest serving members of the English House of Commons. Son of a wealthy lawyer with extensive estates in Buckinghamshire, Waller first entered Parliament in 1624, although he played little part in the political struggles of the period prior to the First English Civil War in 1642. Unlike his relatives William and Hardress Waller, he was Royalist in sympathy and was accused in 1643 of organising a plot to seize London for Charles I. He allegedly escaped the death penalty by paying a large bribe, while several conspirators were executed, including his brother-in-law Nathaniel Tomkins. After his sentence was commuted to banishment, he lived in comfortable exile in France and Switzerland until allowed home in 1651 by Oliver Cromwell, a distant relative. He returned to Parliament after The Restorati ...
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Restoration (England)
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland took place in 1660 when King Charles II returned from exile in continental Europe. The preceding period of the Protectorate and the civil wars came to be known as the Interregnum (1649–1660). The term ''Restoration'' is also used to describe the period of several years after, in which a new political settlement was established. It is very often used to cover the whole reign of King Charles II (1660–1685) and often the brief reign of his younger brother King James II (1685–1688). In certain contexts it may be used to cover the whole period of the later Stuart monarchs as far as the death of Queen Anne and the accession of the Hanoverian King George I in 1714. For example, Restoration comedy typically encompasses works written as late as 1710. The Protectorate After Richard Cromwell, Lord Protector from 1658 to 1659, ceded power to the Rump Parliament, Charles Fleetwood an ...
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Sir Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh (; – 29 October 1618) was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England against the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I. Raleigh was born to a Protestant family in Devon, the son of Walter Raleigh and Catherine Champernowne. He was the younger half-brother of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and a cousin of Sir Richard Grenville. Little is known of his early life, though in his late teens he spent some time in France taking part in the religious civil wars. In his 20s he took part in the suppression of rebellion in the colonisation of Ireland; he also participated in the siege of Smerwick. Later, he became a landlord of property in Ireland and mayor of Youghal in East Munster, where his house still stands in Myrtle Grove. He rose rapidly in the favour o ...
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an a ...
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Helen Gardner (critic)
Dame Helen Louise Gardner, (13 February 1908 – 4 June 1986) was an English literary critic and academic. Gardner began her teaching career at the University of Birmingham, and from 1966 to 1975 was a Merton Professors, Merton Professor of English Literature, the first woman to have that position. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot, but also published on John Milton and William Shakespeare. She published over a dozen books, and received multiple honours. Her critical stance was traditional and focused on history and biography; it involved the work's historical context, the personal habits of the author, and the relationship of the text to the time period. One of her beliefs was that a literary critic's job is to assist other people in reading for themselves. Personal life Gardner was the daughter of Charles Henry and Helen Mary Roadnight Cockman Gardner. She went to North London Collegiate School. She did her Bachelor of Arts, B.A. at St Hi ...
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