Edmund Waller Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas Kaminski

Critical Essay by Thomas Kaminski

SOURCE: Kaminski, Thomas. “Edmund Waller: English Precieux.” Philological Quarterly 79, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 19-43.

In the following essay, Kaminski argues that Waller was the first English precieux poet.

Everyone who has pondered the vagaries of poetic reputations knows that Edmund Waller is a problem. When he died in 1687, his tomb was graced with a Latin epitaph that declared him “among the poets of his time, easily the first”—and the poets of his time included Milton, Cowley, the Cavaliers, several of the Metaphysicals, and Dryden. This praise was by no means a distortion of his contemporary reputation: as late as 1766 the authors of the Biographia Britannica could still call him “the most celebrated Lyric Poet that ever England produced.”¹ To modern critics such estimates seem the result of an affected (or perhaps depraved) poetic taste. Today when Waller is not ignored, he is generally disparaged.² Those who would...
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