Edmund Waller

Born in 1606, Edmund Waller was an English poet and politician from a wealthy Buckinghamshire family. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, entered Parliament while still very young, and became known both for his speaking and for graceful lyrics that circulated long before they were collected in print.

Waller is often remembered for helping shape a smoother, more regular poetic line in English. Readers and critics have linked his polished couplets and lyrical ease with the later rise of the heroic couplet, making him an important bridge between earlier 17th-century poetry and the style that would dominate the next generation.

His life was not only literary. He was deeply involved in politics during the turbulent years around the English Civil War, was implicated in a royalist plot in 1643, and spent time in exile before eventually returning to public life. He died in 1687, leaving behind a reputation as both a courtly poet and a durable public figure.