Edward Young
(Upham, near Winchester, 1683-Welwyn, Hertfordshire, 1765) British poet, one of the main precursors of romanticism.He studied at New College, Oxford.In the course of his activity he aspired to obtain distinctions, an objective that he possibly thought to achieve through adulation, since his first publications include an Epistle to Lord Lansdowne , the extensive poem The last day (1713), dedicated to the queen, and The force of religion or Jupiter defeated (1714).
Edward Young
The tragedy Busiris (1719) marked his entry into the theater and gave him a certain popularity; However, some contemporaries criticized him for his desire for exhibition and his style, high-sounding, rhetorical and lacking in poetic inspiration.The same year, with a former fellow student, the dissolute Duke of Wharton, his benefactor, Edward Young undertook a trip to Ireland; However, economic circumstances put an end to such friendship.In 1721 the author worked again for the scene with Revenge , another tragedy, this time inspired by Shakespeare ( Othello ); success, however, was meager.
The failure in politics greatly embittered Young, who, at least in part, had to orient his muse toward satire; he exercised this genre, in heroic couplets, in seven compositions published between 1725 and 1728, and titled according to the last one, The Universal Passion .Such works earned him the praise of S.Johnson and brought him a remarkable sum that improved the writer's financial situation.In the meantime, and thanks to the good offices of Sir R.Walpole, he had secured a royal pension of two hundred pounds sterling a year, the insufficiency of which he always regretted.
Young's fame was not exactly splendid when the frustration of his ambitions suggested he retreat to an ecclesiastical career, in which, even if he never stood out, he behaved, at least, with dignity.He was thus chaplain to the king (1728) and rector of Welwyn (1830); However, he never reached high positions in the hierarchy of the Church, which disappointed him.In 1731 he married the wealthy Lady Elizabeth Lee, daughter of Count Litchfield and a widow with a little daughter (who later became Mrs.Temple); he had a son from her whom he was about to disinherit.
When he tended to lyrical-elegiac poetry he gave Young a very mediocre test of his ability.However, and even this may seem very strange, the most notable work of our author, and specifically the one that gave him the category of head of school, is one of his elegies: The nights (1742-Four.Five).The reason for the poem was domestic misadventures (the death of his wife, his son-in-law and his natural daughter, Narcissa), whose lively emotion, sincerely expressed, is revealed through highly communicative verses, in which pessimistic sensitivity seems to tend to a moral search.
The adjective "head of school", however, is inappropriate, at least chronologically, applied to Young, because his themes (night, funeral thoughts, contrast between life and death) had found and its oldest expressions in Milton, Pope, Lady Winclesea and Thonison.In Young, however, nature as the source of painful emotions, the "pathos" of the tearful genre and pessimism come together to constitute the almost official principle of a literature of "sensitivity", to which the taste of the time tended..The elegy was immediately successful, particularly outside England.
In 1753 Youn's third play appeared, The Brothers , composed long before, possibly while the poet was preparing to receive holy orders; Such a composition adds or detracts from the author's fame.
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