To the Memory of Mr. Oldham (1684) is an elegy written by John Dryden (1631–1700), commemorating the death of the poet John Oldham.
John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England's first Poet Laureate in 1668.
John Oldham was an English satirical poet and translator.
Farewell, too little, and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own:
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mold with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.
To the same goal did both our studies drive;
The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
While his young friend performed and won the race.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail and farewell; farewell, thou young,
But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue;
Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around. [1]
"In this elegy, John Dryden laments the death of John Oldham (1653–1683), the young poet whose Satires upon the Jesuits (1681), which Dryden admired, were written in 1679, before Dryden's major satires appeared (see line 8)." [2] Dryden laments that he has made Oldham's acquaintance much too late and that Oldham died much too young. Their poetry and their thinking (i.e. their souls) were very similar ("For sure our souls were near allied, and thine / Cast in the same poetic mold with mine."). They both disliked "knaves and fools" which are "[o]bjects of satire." [3] They both had the same goals. Oldham is compared to Nisus, who "on the point of winning a footrace, slipped in a pool of blood" [4] in Vergil's Aeneid . Dryden then asks how Oldham's "to thy abundant store / What could advancing age have added more?" and is sure that his verse could have been perfected, but this would not have been required as "satire needs not those [perfect metrics], and wit will shine / Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line." Here, "Dryden repeats the Renaissance idea that the satirist should avoid smoothness and affect rough meters […]." [5] Moreover, Dryden points out that this would be "A noble error, and but seldom made, / When poets are by too much force betrayed." As Oldham was still young his "generous fruit […] / Still showed a quickness," but Dryden finds comfort in the fact that "maturing time / But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme." The poem is concluded with an echo of "the famous words that conclude Catullus's elegy to his brother: 'Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale' (And forever, brother, hail and farewell!)." [6] Marcellus, who is mentioned in line 23, is "[t]he nephew of Augustus, adopted by him as his successor. After winning military fame as a youth, [Marcellus] died at the age of twenty". [7]
Nisus and Euryalus are a pair of friends and lovers serving under Aeneas in the Aeneid, the Augustan epic by Virgil. Their foray among the enemy, narrated in Book nine, demonstrates their stealth and prowess as warriors, but ends as a tragedy: the loot Euryalus acquires attracts attention, and the two die together. Virgil presents their deaths as a loss of admirable loyalty and valor. They also appear in Book 5, during the funeral games of Anchises, where Virgil takes note of their amor pius, a love that exhibits the pietas that is Aeneas's own distinguishing virtue.
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, which is about personal life rather than classical heroes. His surviving works are still read widely and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, hexameter was invented by Phemonoe, daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi.
John Donne was an English poet and cleric in the Church of England.
Apostrophe is an exclamatory figure of speech. It occurs when a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience and directs speech to a 3rd party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes absent from the scene. Often the addressee is a personified abstract quality or inanimate object. In dramatic works and poetry written in or translated into English, such a figure of speech is often introduced by the vocative exclamation, "O". Poets may apostrophize a beloved, the Muse, God, love, time, or any other entity that can’t respond in reality.
In poetry, a dimeter is a metrical line of verse with two feet. The particular foot, of course, can vary.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, often known simply as Boileau, was a French poet and critic. He did much to reform the prevailing form of French poetry, in the same way that Blaise Pascal did to reform the prose. He was greatly influenced by Horace.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
The lais of Marie de France are a series of twelve short narrative Breton lais by the poet Marie de France. They are written in the Anglo-Norman and were probably composed in the late 12th century. The short, narrative poems generally focus on glorifying the concept of courtly love by the adventures of their main characters. Marie's lais are thought to form the basis for what would eventually become the genre known as the Breton lais. Despite her stature in Anglo-Norman literature and medieval French literature generally, little is known of Marie herself, but it is thought that she was born in France and wrote in England.
Absalom and Achitophel is a celebrated satirical poem by John Dryden, written in heroic couplets and first published in 1681. The poem tells the Biblical tale of the rebellion of Absalom against King David, but this tale is an allegory used to represent a story contemporary to Dryden, a story of King Charles II and the Exclusion Crisis (1679-1681). The poem also references the Popish Plot (1678) and the Monmouth Rebellion (1685).
W. W. Norton & Company is an American publishing company based in New York City. It has been owned wholly by its employees since the early 1960s. The company is known for its Norton Anthologies and its texts in the Norton Critical Editions series, both of which are frequently assigned in university literature courses.
Thomas Creech was an English translator of classical works, and headmaster of Sherborne School. Creech translated Lucretius into verse in 1682, for which he received a Fellowship at Oxford. He also produced English versions of Manilius, Horace, Theocritus, and other classics.
Mac Flecknoe is a verse mock-heroic satire written by John Dryden. It is a direct attack on Thomas Shadwell, another prominent poet of the time. It opens with the lines:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. First published in 1962, it has gone through ten editions; as of 2006 there are over eight million copies in print, making it the publisher's best-selling anthology. M. H. Abrams, a critic and scholar of Romanticism, served as General Editor for its first seven editions, before handing the job to Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar and Harvard professor. The anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, and letters from Beowulf to the beginning of the 21st century.
"Darkness" is a poem written by Lord Byron in July 1816. That year was known as the Year Without a Summer, because Mount Tambora had erupted in the Dutch East Indies the previous year, casting enough sulphur into the atmosphere to reduce global temperatures and cause abnormal weather across much of north-east America and northern Europe. This pall of darkness inspired Byron to write his poem. Literary critics were initially content to classify it as a "last man" poem, telling the apocalyptic story of the last man on earth. More recent critics have focused on the poem's historical context, as well as the anti-biblical nature of the poem, despite its many references to the Bible. The poem was written only months after the end of Byron's marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke.
The following is a list of literary terms; that is, those words used in discussion, classification, criticism, and analysis of poetry, novels, and picture books.
Elizabeth Thomas was a British poet.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Inscape and instress are complementary concepts about individuality and uniqueness derived by Gerard Manley Hopkins from the ideas of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus.
[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe 'selves,' that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it.