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This article profiles poet, novelist and essayist Joseph Addison of Milston, Wiltshire, England. Educated at Charterhouse School, it was with his schoolfellow Richard Steele that he was closely associated in the production of the Tatler and the Spectator, periodicals that, often reprinted through the century, exerted a remarkable influence on the characteristic attitudes and assumptions of their age. In 1702, he published his Letter from Italy, in which Alexander Pope took an interest, and in 1704 The Campaign, a rather plodding account of the battle of Blenheim, the poem achieving a degree of contemporary popularity that it is now hard to understand.

This article presents a biography of author Samuel Butler. Grandson of Bishop Samuel Butler and reared by a very stern father, Butler was educated at Shrewsbury School and St. John's College in Cambridge, England. In 1865, he published The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, offering an ironic analysis of the Gospel narratives. In 1873 appeared The Fair Haven, in which the earlier pamphlet was incorporated as, allegedly, the work of a certain John Pickard Owen, recently dead. The greatest single work of Butler, The Way of All Flesh, was published posthumously in 1903, but was written between 1873 and 1885.

This article focuses on the literary works of Bernabe Barnes. Barnes' first publication was a collection of Renaissance sonnet sequence entitled Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, Elegies, and Odes. Equally rich in biblical allusion, A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets is a poetic rhetoric that could be described as a sacred parody of Petrarchanism. Foure Bookes of Offices: Enabling Privat Persons for the Special Service of All Good Princes and Policies is a prose work focusing on principles of civil government. Barker has also written a play, The Devil's Character.

This article profiles English author Charles Cotton. Born on April 28, 1630, Cotton made interesting contributions to English literature in three areas: as a poet, as a prose writer and as a translator. Reared in the disturbed years of the Civil War, Cotton valued the meditative solitude of the country life. In The Retirement, he writes persuasively of the peace and innocence to be found among his beloved Rocks and rivers, where he can enjoy Solitude, the Soul's Best Friend. As a translator, his most substantial achievement is undoubtedly his fine version of Montaigne's Essays, which has often been reprinted. It is a generally accurate translation, though he feels free to add a number of interpolations of his own.

This article describes some of the works of English poet Richard Corbett. In some ways, his most substantial piece of work, Iter Boreale is a kind of miniature odyssey of the ordinary; it narrates, with great good humor, a journey made by a group of friends from Oxford, around the towns and countryside of the English midlands and back to Oxford again. His anti-Puritanism lies behind a number of his best poems, whether in the parodic monologues of An Exhortation To Mr. John Hammon minister in the parish of Bewdly, for the battering downe of the Vanityes of the Gentiles, which are comprehended in a May-pole; written by a Zealous Brother from the Black-fryers and The Distracted Puritane, or in the controlled anger of his lines Upon Faireford Windowes.

This article profiles poet and musical composer Thomas Campion of Whitman, Essex, England. He was one of the finest Latin poets of the English Renaissance and stands high in the ranks of English composers of song. Of more immediate relevance, he was one of the most technically assured English poets of his day. Most of Campion's lyrics are contained in the series of songbooks he published: A Book of Ayres (1601), Two Bookes of Ayres. Mixing rhymed verse and lively prose, Campion's masques (most notably Lord Hay's Masque and The Lords' Masque) are marked by a clarity of structure that is characteristic of their author, by an alert responsiveness to the social and political demands of their various occasions, and by an apt mythological wit.

This article presents a biographical information on the late writer William Drummond of Hawthornden. He has a place in the history of English literature both as a poet and as a writer of miscellaneous prose texts. It is perhaps as a writer of sonnets that Drummond the poet has his greatest importance. In 1616, he published Poems: Amorous, Funerall, Divine, Pastorall, in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals, a volume whose range of themes and forms is well indicated by its lengthy subtitle.

This article presents a biographical information on the late poet Michael Drayton. He might reasonably be called the quintessentially Elizabethan poet. He displays the characteristically Elizabethan blend of conservatism and innovation. He wrote in most of the genres typical of his age, such as the pastoral and the love sonnet, historical poetry and religious verse, topographical poetry and verse drama, mythological narrative and satire.

The article provides biographical information on British author George Gilfillan. Gilfillan was, for a relatively brief period, one of the most influential voices in the formation of literary taste in Britain. He edited a series of editions of British poets that was attractively produced and widely read; he wrote popular biographies of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. He published a series of essays, under the collective title of Literary Portraits, which exerted a considerable influence on middle-class taste.

Profiles author and poet James Howell. Career highlights of the author; Influence of Howell's imprisonment on his extensive literary activity; Poems written by Howell.

Profiles English poet John Heath-Stubbs. Examples of his literary works; Career highlights of Heath-Stubbs as a translator; Books on poetic genres written by the poet.

This article profiles author James Kirkup. Kirkup has written and published extraordinary abundance since 1942. His subject matter astonishing in its variety. He writes of other poets and of jazz; of football and sex; of travel and death; of potholing and surgery; and much else. In the range of poetic forms he employs, he is equally various. He is an acknowledged English expert on and master of such brief Japanese forms as the haiku and the tanka; he is also the author of the poem Pikadon, and An Extended Breath, which collects together his Longer Poems and Sequences.

This article profiles author Henry King. A distinguished and historically important churchman, Bishop of Chichester before and after the Civil War, King is of literary importance both as a poet and as the author of some striking sermons. His achievement as a poet include The Psalmes of David, Upon the Death of my Ever Desired Friend Dr. Donne Deane of Paules, and To my Dead Friend Ben Johnson.

This article profiles Richard Lovelace, an English poet. The poems of Lovelace were published in two seventeenth-century collections, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, etc, to which is Added Aramantha: A Pastoral and Lucasta: Posthume Poems. Though the body of his work is not great, his poems are strikingly various, both in kind and in level of achievement. Lovelace has suffered from the overfamiliarity of one or two of his poems, which have presented an over-simple picture of a complex man and an accomplished poet.

The article presents information on the life and works of English songwriter Henry Lawes. Though not himself a poet, Lawes deserves a place of some prominence in any history of English poetry. He was the most important songwriter of the Caroline period and the Interregnum. This was a period when much of the finest lyrical poetry was designed for musical setting and among the poets of this period there seems to have been a widely shared agreement that it was Lawes who could be relied upon to do fullest justice to their work, in ways that would respect both their art and his. Lawes set texts by most of the finest lyrical poets of his time. They include John Donne, Thomas Carew and Richard Lovelace.

This article provides information on the plays written by George Peele. Most of his plays are more notable for the quality of the verse they contain than for their author's understanding of dramatic structure, character, or plot. In his first play The Arraignment of Paris, he makes witty use of the mythological narrative of the Judgment of Paris to pay fulsome tribute to Elizabeth I. The Old Wives Tale is a unique mixture of motifs from folklore and romance.

This article features English poet Peter Russell. He was born on September 16, 1921 in Bristol, England. His own work, like that of Ezra Pound, who he has more than once described as his master, is certainly rooted in a soil much older and richer than that of post-modernism. Indeed, the range of his reference and quotation, the chronological and linguistic range of the materials on which Ezra draws, and that Ezra transforms in his poetry, can often present the reader with difficulties. His sources and influences range from Plato to Dante to Blok, and Ficino to Jung.

This article presents biographical information on British dramatist Thomas Randolph. The author was born in June 1605 in Northamptonshire, England and died in March 1635. Some of his famous works are The Muses' Looking Glasse; The Conceited Pedlar; Hey for Honesty, Down With Knavery; and, The Jealous Lovers.

This article features the works of poet William Strode. The poems of Strode have not received the attention they deserve. Strode published no collection during his lifetime and no attempt was made to gather his poems together until 1907. Strode's contemporaries thought highly of his individual poems by him were very popular, as consultation of the manuscript catalogues of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England or the British Library, or browsing through the pages of printed poetical miscellanies of the period, will readily show. One of Strode's lyrics, On Chloris Walking in the Snow, was one of the most popular poems of the century. His solitary dramatic work, The Floating Island, was performed before Charles I and his court at Oxford on August 29, 1636, with music by Henry Lawes.

This article presents information on British author Thomas Stanley. After being privately tutored and study at Pembroke College in Cambridge, England, Stanley spent some years living in France. He returned to England, perhaps in the mid-1640s, and took up residence in the Middle Temple in London. Inherited wealth allowed him to live a life of some leisure and to act as a patron to other writers.