Benn Sowerby

Selected Poems of George Wither Benn Sowerby

George Wither 1588 - 1667, was a poet whose output was prolific and though much does not always reach the highest flights of poetry for as Anthony Wood states in his Athenae Oxoniensis "for I know of no writer from whose works more exquisite passages can be culled than from his". His poem Britain's Remembrancer, an eye-witness account of the Great Plague, was used as source material by Daniel Defoe for his novel A Journal of the Plague Year. Throughout his life he continued writing poetry though in his later years, as he became a convinced puritan, his poetic output was mostly religious. His 'Hymns and Songs of the Church', later set to music by Orlando Gibbons, is notable for being the first in which the author successfully asserted copyright to his own work. The general estimation of Wither's poetry has fluctuated over the years but his work has always found admirers for as George Saintsbury says In his History of English Literature "It may be questioned whether, though we have since had far greater poets than he is, we have ever had greater poetry than his".