Edmund Waller today is chiefly remembered, by those who remember him at all, for one of three things: his craven behavior in connection with the exposure of an abortive Royalist conspiracy, known as "Waller's Plot"; his sharing with Sir John Denham the most precipitous collapse and lasting eclipse of the most celebrated contemporary reputation in the annals of English literature; or his poem "Go, Lovely Rose," inevitably cited in practically every anthology as an example of the perfect Cavalier lyric. Paradoxically, however, Waller's contemporaries and the critics of the eighteenth century who heaped praises on his poetic gifts never mention this poem. Instead, they admire and comment on the political panegyrics, poems of compliment to noblemen and great ladies, and the poetry of social occasions--the poems that to readers from the Romantic period until recently have seemed the least susceptible to resuscitation of all Waller's literary efforts. In...