Edward Young

Edward Young (Upham, 1683-Welwyn, 1765) was an English poet who stands between the Augustan age and the early Romantic movement. Writing in English, he is best remembered for meditative and funereal verse, which earned him the nickname of the «graveyard poet». His influence reached well beyond Britain during the eighteenth century.

The son of a clergyman who later became Dean of Salisbury, he was educated at Winchester and Oxford, where he was attached to All Souls College. His first poems were written to order: verses addressed to Queen Anne and then to William III, praising those who might offer him patronage. For decades he sought patrons, pensions and church appointments, usually without success. His fulsome praise damaged his reputation, and he eventually left many of these occasional poems out of his collected works.

His more lasting work came by other routes. He wrote tragedies such as Busiris (1719) and The Revenge (1721), and between 1725 and 1728 he published a series of moral satires in the manner of Pope, collected as Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. Samuel Johnson admired the poem, and its success helped him recover from financial losses. Around 1728 he became a royal chaplain and, shortly after, took up the living at Welwyn.

The deaths of his wife and of her daughter within a few years in the late 1730s shaped his most famous work. Night Thoughts, published in nine «nights» between 1742 and 1745, is a long, sombre meditation on death, faith and the immortality of the soul, written in blank verse and dense with dark imagery. It was enormously popular, translated into many languages, and became a touchstone for the early Romantics. Later, in Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), he argued that original genius deserved more value than imitation of the classics, an idea that found a wide audience on the Continent.