author
Thomas Parnell
1679–1718
Remembered for graceful, reflective verse, this Anglo-Irish poet and clergyman moved in the same literary circles as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. His poems helped shape the polished, musical style admired in the early eighteenth century.
1 Audiobook
Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes
by Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, T. (Tobias) Smollett
About the author
Born in Dublin in 1679, Thomas Parnell was an Anglo-Irish poet and Anglican clergyman. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, later entered the church, and became known both for his learning and for the ease and clarity of his verse.
Parnell was closely connected with some of the best-known writers of his age, including Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Britannica notes that Pope valued his scholarship, especially in work connected with the Iliad, and Parnell's writing was admired for its lyric quality and smooth style.
He died in Chester in 1718. Although his life was brief, his reputation lasted well beyond it, with later readers continuing to remember poems such as A Night-Piece on Death and his place in the lively literary world of the early 1700s.