author
Edmund Waller
1606–1687
A polished voice of 17th-century English verse, he helped shape the smooth, balanced style that later poets would make famous. His long public life was just as dramatic, stretching through civil war, exile, and Restoration politics.
1 Audiobook
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham
by Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham
About the author
Born in 1606, Edmund Waller was an English poet and politician who spent much of his life close to public affairs. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, entered Parliament very young, and went on to serve in the House of Commons across several decades.
Waller is best remembered for the elegance of his poetry. Critics and literary histories often single him out for helping make English verse sound smoother and more regular, especially in the couplets that became so important later in the century. His poems range from courtly compliments and love lyrics to political and occasional verse, and they were admired by later writers including John Dryden and Alexander Pope.
His career was not without danger. During the turmoil of the 1640s he was implicated in a royalist conspiracy, arrested, and eventually driven into exile for a time before returning to England. That mix of literary polish and political survival gives his life a distinctive shape: he was not only a writer of graceful lines, but also a man who navigated one of the most unsettled periods in English history.