Edward Benlowes is significant equally for his patronage of the arts during the reign of Charles I and for an ambitious "heroic" poem on the ascent of the devout soul to God, which, despite its real merits, has been found difficult to take seriously because of obscure organization and stylistic extravagance; yet Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton were among the poets he influenced. At his best Benlowes had a capacity for both ecstatic utterance and telling satire. He could deploy the devices of Metaphysical wit with great effectiveness but could also egregiously overdo them. Anthony Wood, who befriended Benlowes during his final years in Oxford, epitomized him as "much noted in his time, but since not, for the art and faculty of poetry." Samuel Butler ridiculed him as a "small poet"; Alexander Pope in The Dunciad (1728) blasted his judgment as a patron ("propitious ... to blockheads"); and...