Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Edmund Wailer” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Edmund Wailer

(1606 – 1687)

Edmund Waller was a celebrated poet and wit in his lifetime, and many of his poems had long circulated in manuscript before the 1645 publication of his Poems. The first fully authorised edition was that of 1664. Edmund Waller was born on March 3, 1606 in Coleshill, Hertfordshire (now in Buckinghamshire), the eldest son of a wealthy landowner. He was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. Edmund was elected to Parliament at the young age of 16, and became a noted orator. On 5 July 1631, Waller married Anne Banks, a London heiress, but she died after three years of marriage.

During the troubled 1640s, Waller tried to maintain a moderate course between the King and his opponents. In 1643 he devised a plot to oust the Parliamentary rebels, ‘Roundheads’, and to secure London for the King. When the plot, known as Waller’s Plot’, was discovered in May, Waller was arrested and brought before the Parliament. Waller confessed and pleaded for mercy, but his freedom lay in bribes and betrayal of his co-conspirators—Waller was fined heavily (L10,000) and exiled. Waller lived in Paris, travelling occasionally in Italy and Switzerland, until 1652 when he was allowed to return. He returned to Parliament and was re-turned to royal favour at the Restoration.

In 1655 appeared the Panegyrick to my Lord Protector, celebrating Cromwell, and in 1660 To the King, Upon His Majesty’s Happy Return, celebrating the restoration of Charles II. To Samuel Johnson this writing of panegyrics to both Cromwell and Charles evinced moral vacuity -Upon Charles’ observation that Cromwell’s was the better poem, Waller supposedly answered: “Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction.” Waller’s later works include Divine Poems (1685) and The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems, posthumously published in 1690.

Waller, a member of the Royal Society, brought refinement to the heroic couplet, which led to the symmetrical patterning of the Augustan heroic couplet. It is no surprise that Waller’s poetry was highly esteemed in the eighteenth century. Dryden wrote that Waller “first made writing easily an art.” Alexander Pope acknowledged Waller as a master, and the Biographia Britannica (1766) called him “the most celebrated lyric poet that ever England produced.” Waller’s reputation and readership has since steadily declined, and he is known today mostly for his lyrics ‘Go, Lovely Rose, and (On a Girdle’. Waller died in his bed, aged 82, on October 21, 1687.