author
William John Courthope
1842–1917
A Victorian critic and historian of poetry, this English man of letters spent decades tracing how poems grow out of the life of a nation. He is best remembered for his sweeping multi-volume History of English Poetry and for his work on Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison.
1 Audiobook
Addison
by William John Courthope
About the author
Born in South Malling, Sussex, in 1842, he was educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, where he earned top honors in classics and won prizes for both poetry and English essay. Early in his career he worked in the British Civil Service, later serving as a private secretary to the Earl of Beaconsfield.
He built his reputation as a literary critic and scholar with books on figures such as Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope, but his largest project was History of English Poetry, published in six volumes between 1895 and 1910. In that work, he argued that poetry should be understood in relation to the character and history of the society that produced it.
He later became professor of poetry at Oxford and was recognized by his contemporaries as an important voice in English literary criticism. Courthope died in 1917, leaving behind a body of work that tried to connect literature, politics, and national culture in one continuous story.