Poetry
Davies wrote poetry in numerous forms, but is best known for his epigrammes and sonnets. In 1599 he published Nosce Teipsum (Know thyself) and Hymnes of Astraea. Queen Elizabeth became an admirer of Davies' work, and these poems contain acrostics that spell out the phrase Elisabetha Regina.
Davies is a great example of "new" poetry in the 1590s. This was a poetry characterized by a burning delight in intellectual analysis and a pure passion for knowledge. Davies' works are very well represented in Elizabethan anthologies. The last complete edition of his poems appeared in 1876 and is long out of print.
His most famous poem, Nosce Teipsum, was reprinted numerous times, and was one of the first English poems to use the decasyllabic quatrain instead of the heroic couplet for a poem of its scope. It won him the favor of James I, by which he won promotion in Ireland. The poem summarizes the main issues in religious thought in the Elizabethan Era, addressing the relation of body to soul, and of Materialism to Idealism. A.H. Bullen described it as being "singularly readable for such a subject: highly accomplished verse, no Elizabethan quaintness, bothe subtle and terse".
A.H. Bullen also described Davies' Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing as "brilliant and graceful". This poem, formed in tiny octavos, reveals a typical Elizabethan pleasure: contemplating and trying to understand the relationship between the natural order and human activity.
Much historical knowledge can be gained from the reading of Davies' poetry. Queen Elizabeth's anger at Bishop Fletcher's second marriage, to a beautiful young woman, becomes more understandable after taking into account her loose character explained in Davies' writings. Another epigram speaks of a practice of "masochism" at the time. This is where sexual gratification comes from physical pain and suffering, perhaps being whipped by women.
Read more about this topic: John Davies (poet)
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)