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Biography of Walter Raleigh, SirName: Walter Raleigh, SirBirth Date: c. 1552 Death Date: October 29, 1618 Place of Birth: Devonshire, England Nationality: English Gender: Male Occupations: explorer, statesman, courtier Walter Raleigh, Sir The English statesman Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1552-1618) was also a soldier, courtier, explorer and exponent of overseas expansion, man of letters, and victim of Stuart mistrust and Spanish hatred.Born into a prominent Protestant Devonshire family, Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh) spent time at Oriel College, Oxford, before leaving to join the Huguenot army in the French religious war in 1569. Five years in France saw him safely through two major battles and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. By 1576 he was in London as a lodger (not a law student) at the Middle Temple and saw his verses, prefixed to George Gascoigne's Steele Glas, in print. His favorite poetic theme, the impermanence of all earthly things, was popular with other Renaissance poets. However, Raleigh's verse differs from theirs: for their richly decorated quality and smoothly musical rhythms, he substituted a colloquial diction and a simplicity and directness of statement that prefigured …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, edited by Agnes M. C. Latham (1929).There is no completely satisfactory biography of Raleigh. Edward Edwards, The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh Based on Contemporary Documents ... Together with His Letters (2 vols., 1868), lacks much material that is now available. Among the most useful works are Edward Thompson, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Last of the Elizabethans (1935), and Willard M. Wallace, Sir Walter Raleigh (1959). Raleigh's role in natural philosophy and his connection with Thomas Hariot are treated in Robert Kargon, Atomism in England (1966). His contact with Christopher Marlowe is explored at length in M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Relegh (1936), and in Ernest Albert Strathmann, Sir Walter Raleigh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (1951). A. L. Rowse's The England of Elizabeth: The Structure of Society (1950) and The Expansion of Elizabethan England (1955) provide a valuable general view of the period. |