Raleigh's poetry is written in the relatively straightforward, unornamented mode known as the plain style. C. S. Lewis considered Raleigh one of the era's "silver poets", a group of writers who resisted the Italian Renaissance influence of dense classical reference and elaborate poetic devices. His writing contains strong personal treatments of themes such as love, loss, beauty, and time. Most of his poems are short lyrics that were inspired by actual events.[3]
In poems such as "What is Our Life" and "The Lie", Raleigh expresses a contemptus mundi (contempt of the world) attitude more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the dawning era of humanistic optimism. But his lesser-known long poem "The Ocean's Love to Cynthia" combines this vein with the more elaborate conceits associated with his contemporaries Edmund Spenser and John Donne, expressing a melancholy sense of history. The poem was written during his imprisonment in the Tower of London.[3]
Raleigh wrote a poetic response to Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" of 1592, entitled "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd". Both were written in the style of traditional pastoral poetry and follow the structure of six four-line stanzas employing a rhyme scheme of AABB, with Raleigh's an almost line-for-line refutation of Marlowe's sentiments.[69] Years later, the 20th-century poet William Carlos Williams would join the poetic "argument" with his "Raleigh Was Right".
List of poems
All finished, and some unfinished, poems written by Raleigh or plausibly attributed to him:[c]
- "The Advice"
- "Another of the Same"
- "Conceit begotten by the Eyes"
- "Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney"
- "Epitaph on the Earl of Leicester"
- "Even such is Time"
- "The Excuse"
- "False Love"
- "Farewell to the Court"
- "His Petition to Queen Anne of Denmark"
- "If Cynthia be a Queen"
- "In Commendation of George Gascoigne's Steel Glass"
- "The Lie"
- "Like Hermit Poor"
- "Lines from Catullus"
- "Love and Time"
- "My Body in the Walls captive"
- "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"
- "Of Spenser's Faery Queen"
- "On the Snuff of a Candle"
- "The Ocean's Love to Cynthia"
- "A Poem entreating of Sorrow"
- "A Poem put into my Lady Laiton's Pocket"
- "The Pilgrimage"
- "A Prognistication upon Cards and Dice"
- "The Shepherd's Praise of Diana"
- "Sweet Unsure"
- "To His Mistress"
- "To the Translator of Lucan's Pharsalia"
- "What is Our Life?"
- "The Wood, the Weed, the Wag"
Writing Shakespeare
In 1845, Shakespeare scholar Delia Bacon first proposed that a group of authors had actually written the plays later attributed to William Shakespeare, the main writer being Walter Raleigh.[70][71] Later, George S. Caldwell asserted that Raleigh was actually the sole author.[72] These claims have been supported by other scholars throughout subsequent years, including Albert J. Beveridge and Henry Pemberton, but are rejected by the majority of Shakespearean scholars today.[d]
