author
Edward Young
1683–1765
Best remembered for the dark, reflective poem Night Thoughts, this English writer turned grief, faith, and mortality into some of the eighteenth century’s most widely read verse. He was also a clergyman and dramatist whose work reached far beyond his own time.
3 Audiobooks
The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2
by Edward Young
The Revenge: A Tragedy
by Edward Young
About the author
Born in 1683 in Upham, Hampshire, Edward Young was educated at Winchester College and Oxford. He built a varied career as a poet, dramatist, and man of the church, and later became rector of Welwyn, a post he held for many years.
Young wrote satires, plays, and literary criticism, but his lasting fame rests on The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, published in the 1740s. The poem’s meditations on loss, death, and eternal life were shaped in part by personal bereavements, and its serious, emotional tone made it one of the best-known poems of the century.
Although deeply rooted in its religious and moral world, Young’s writing also had a wide literary afterlife. Night Thoughts influenced later readers and writers in Britain and Europe, and it remains the work most closely linked with his name today.