The almost universal adulation given Edmund Waller in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries -- an adulation which, often as not, attached to his reform of poetry -- has been commonly accepted with little question of the grounds on which it is based. In this essay Alexander Ward Allison presents for the first time a specific analysis of the changes from Jacobean modes which Waller made, suggesting in the course of his analysis that the seventeenth century saw not a dissociation of sensibility, but rather a new fusion, of which Waller is a type.
By a careful and detailed...
The almost universal adulation given Edmund Waller in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries -- an adulation which, often as not, atta...