Samuel Butler (poet)

Samuel Butler ( born February 8, 1612 Strensham, Worcestershire, † September 25, 1680 in London) was an English poet.

Life

The farmer's son received his academic education at the Cathedral School and Worcester at the University of Cambridge. He was a clerk in a magistrate. After it lingers after some time in the house of Countess Elisabeth of Kent and used the library, he entered the service of Sir Samuel Luke, an officer of Cromwell and fanatical Puritan, at which religious and political sects exaggerated their essence. Your strange behavior pressed his satirical scourge in the hand, and relentlessly he swung it in his comic epic " Hudibras " (Part 1 and 2, Lond 1663-64, part 3, 1678, . Then often printed together, in the best deluxe edition of Zacharias Grey, with engravings by William Hogarth, Cambridge in 1744, most recently in 1869; . annotated by Nash, first Lond 1793, new illustrated edition, das. 1847, 2 vols; German Soltau, Königsb 1798 and Eiselein. Freiburg 1845).

The poem, apparently an imitation of Don Quixote, describes the adventures of the Presbyterian knight Hudibras and his squire Ralph, which traverse the country in order to destroy all possible evils, but as hypocrites and parasites, which they are, everywhere reap just blows.

The sparkling wit and written in a peculiar style work breaks off unfinished, but also earned in this form as a time and manners mirror high praise. The other poems Butlers are satirical character. King Charles II read his works with keen interest and let him pay the sum of 300 pounds.

But neither this gift nor his marriage with a rich widow protected the poet against oppressive distress. His wife's assets decreased by unfortunate speculations lost, and so he died in 1680 in poverty; 40 years later a monument to him was erected in Westminster Abbey.

Works (selection)

  • Hudibras: Written in the Time of the Late Wars. London 1674 ( 2 vols )
  • Robert Thyer (Ed.): Genuine remains in prose and verse. Booker Books, London 1759 ( 2 vols )
  • Reginald Bell: Poetical works. Oxford 1855 ( 3 vols )
  • Charles C. Clarke ( ed.): Poetical works. London 1878 ( 2 vols )

Literature (selection )

  • Samuel Johnson: The lives of the most eminent english poets. With critical observations on the works. Clarendon Press, Oxford 2005, ISBN 0-19-927897-0 ( here especially Vol 1)
  • Rudolf Boxberger: Butler's Hudibras. A real -time and genre paintings. Teubner, Leipzig 1876 ( zugl. dissertation University of Leipzig).
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