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Bible Encyclopedias
Edmund Waller
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or The terror of discovery, Waller was accused of displaying a very mean poltroonery, and of confessing "whatever he had said, heard, thought or seen, and all that he knew.. or suspected of others." He certainly cut a poor figure by the side of those of his companions who died for their opinions. Waller was called before the bar of the House in July, and made an abject speech of recantation. His life was spared and he was committed to the Tower, whence, on paying a fine of £10,000, he was released and banished the realm in November 1643. He married a second wife, Mary Bracey of Thame, and went over to Calais, afterwards taking up his residence at Rouen. In 1645 the Poems of Waller were first published in London, in three different editions; there has been much discussion of the order and respective authority of these issues, but nothing is decidedly known. Many of the lyrics were already set to music by Henry Lawes. In 1646 Waller travelled with Evelyn in Switzerland and Italy. During the worst period of the exile Waller managed to "keep a table" for the Royalists in Paris, although in order to do so he was obliged to sell his wife's jewels. At the close of 1651 the House of Commons revoked Waller's sentence of banishment, and he was allowed to return to Beaconsfield, where he lived very quietly until the Restoration.
In 1655 he published A Panegyric to my Lord Protector, and was made a Commissioner for Trade a month or two later. He followed this up, in 1660, by a poem To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return. Being challenged by Charles II. to explain why this latter piece was inferior to the eulogy of Cromwell, the poet smartly replied, "Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction." He entered the House of Commons again in 1661, as M.P. for Hastings, and Burnet has recorded that for the next quarter of a century "it was no House if Waller was not there." His sympathies were tolerant and kindly, and he constantly defended the Nonconformists. One famous speech of Waller's was: "Let. us look to our Government, fleet and trade, 'tis the best advice the oldest Parliament man among you can give you, and so God bless you." After the death of his second wife, in 1677, Waller retired to his house called Hall Barn at Beaconsfield, and though he returned to London, he became more and more attached to the retirement of his woods, "where," he said, "he found the trees as bare and withered as himself." In 1661 he had published his poem, St James' Park; in 1664 he had collected his poetical works; in 1666 appeared his Instructions to a Painter; and in 1685 his Divine Poems. The final collection of his works is dated 1686, but there were further posthumous additions made in 1690. Waller bought a cottage at Coleshill, where he was born, meaning to die there; "a stag," he said, "when he is hunted, and near spent, always returns home." He actually died, however, at Hall Barn, with his children and his grandchildren about him, on the 21st of October 1687, and was buried in woollen (in spite of his expressed wish), in the churchyard of Beaconsfield.
Waller's lyrics were at one time admired to excess, but with the exception of "Go, lovely Rose" and one or two others, they have greatly lost their charm. He was almost destitute of imaginative invention, and his fancy was plain and trite. But he resolutely placed himself in the forefront of reaction against the violence and "conceit" into which the baser kind of English poetry was descending. A great deal of discussion, some of it absurdly violent in tone, has been expended on the question how far Waller was or was not the pioneer in introducing the classical couplet into English verse. It is, of course, obvious that Waller could not "introduce" what had been invented, and admirably exemplified, by Chaucer. But those who have pointed to smooth distichs employed by poets earlier than Waller have not given sufficient attention to the fact (exaggerated, doubtless, by critics arguing in the opposite camp) that it was he who earliest made writing in the serried couplet the habit and the fashion. Waller was writing in the regular heroic measure, afterwards carried to so high a perfection by Dryden and Pope, as early as 1623 (if not, as has been supposed, even in 1621).
The only critical edition of Waller's Poetical Works is that edited, with a careful biography, by G. Thorn-Drury, in 1893. (E. G.)
These files are public domain.
Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Edmund Waller'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/e/edmund-waller.html. 1910.
