Sir
John Denham
born 1615, Dublin, Ire.
died March 10, 1669, London, Eng.
poet who established as a new English genre the
leisurely meditative poem describing a
particular landscape.
Educated at the University of Oxford, Denham was
admitted to the bar, but he was already actively
writing. He had translated six books of the
Aeneid, parts of which were later printed; but
he made his reputation with The Sophy, a
blank-verse historical tragedy acted in 1641,
and with Cooper’s Hill, a poem published in
1642. During the English Civil Wars, he was
engaged at home and abroad in the cause of
Charles II. Made a knight of the Bath and
elected to the Royal Society after the
Restoration in 1660, he also served as a member
of Parliament. He was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Denham’s poetry is essentially didactic. Its
strength lies in its gravely reflective ethical
solidity, and it achieves an expression of
balance and unity that is developed out of a
theory of the harmony of opposites. He helped
develop the closed heroic couplet (a couplet
rhyming aa and containing a complete idea, not
dependent upon the preceding or following
couplet). Denham greatly increased the
popularity of that form with Cooper’s Hill, a
new type of descriptive landscape verse that was
imitated by English poets for the next 100
years.
