From Shakespeare to Pope - 1885 Author:Edmund Gosse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WALLER AND SACHARISSA. In that treasury of obsolete opinion and indispensable data, the Biographia Britannica, as published in the year 1766, we find the foll... more »owing startling sentence:—" Edmund Waller, the most celebrated Lyric Poet that England ever produced." If we remark that this confident judgment was expressed in so authoritative a quarter more than a century and a half after the birth of the poet for whom such supremacy was claimed, and that the readers of this phrase were divided from Waller as far as we ourselves are from such old-fashioned poets as Akenside and Falconer, we may well be disposed to marvel at the duration of a fame that has been thoroughly eclipsed at last. Nay more, we may surely feel a curiosity to discover what it was about this half-forgotten poet which can have impressed the public for more than a hundredyears with a sense of his magnitude and importance. And, indeed, the inquiry which we are now engaged in making into the phenomena which attended the great change from romantic to classical poetry in England can only be carried out by giving due and careful attention to the career and character of a lyric poet who reigned supreme until the classical taste declined, and who has been discarded ever since the romantic taste revived. In our last chapter we saw what elements were collected to form the body of English poetry in the decline of such phases of the Renaissance as had reached our shores. In the general disorganization and solution of the old forms of romantic poetry, there was needed an astringent which should brace the textures and condense the solids of literature. In the great romance of Rabelais, we find Ponocrates purging Gargantua with the hellebore of Anticyra to make him forget all that his other masters had taught him1. This harsh ...« less