Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham

Excerpt

It is too true, after all, that the lives of poets are not, in general,
very interesting.  Could we, indeed, trace the private workings of their
souls, and read the pages of their mental and moral development, no
biographies could be richer in instruction, and even entertainment, than
those of our greater bards.  The inner life of every true poet must be
poetical.  But in proportion to the romance of their souls’ story, is
often the commonplace of their outward career.  There have been poets,
however, whose lives are quite as readable and as instructive as their
poetry, and have even shed a reflex and powerful interest on their
writings.  The interest of such lives has, in general, proceeded either
from the extraordinary misfortunes of the bard, or from his extremely
bad morals, or from his strange personal idiosyncrasy, or from his being
involved in the political or religious conflicts of his age.  The life of
Milton, for instance, is rendered intensely interesting from his
connexion with the public affairs of his critical and solemn era.  The
life of Johnson is made readable from his peculiar conformation of body,
his bear-like manners, his oddities, and his early struggles.  You devour
the life of Gifford, not because he was a poet, but because he was a
shoemaker; and that of Byron, more on account of his vices, his peerage,
and his domestic unhappiness, than for the sake of his poetry.  And in
Waller, too, you feel some supplemental interest, because he united what
are usually thought the incompatible characters of a poet and a
political plotter, and very nearly reached the altitudes of the gallows
as well as those of Parnassus.