The literary reputation of Sir John Denham--translator, playwright, poet, Royalist plotter, and Restoration public servant--today rests on his poem Coopers Hill, first published in 1642 and republished, extensively revised, in 1655. Admired both for its political sentiments and its versification, Coopers Hill directly inspired Edmund Waller's Poem on St. James' Park (1661), John Dyer's Grongar Hill (1794), and Alexander Pope's Windsor Forest (1713), as well as numerous other eighteenth-century descriptive poems. The quality of Denham's verse led Samuel Johnson to judge him "one of the fathers of English poetry," a writer who "improved our taste and advanced our language, and whom we ought therefore to read with gratitude." Although no modern critic shares Johnson's enthusiasm, recent research presents Denham as a model of the mid-seventeenth-century man of letters and links him with many important literary figures and practices of the day.

The progress of Denham's literary production is closely tied to the major...