Thomas Campion's importance for nondramatic literature of the English Renaissance lies in the exceptional intimacy of the musical-poetic connection in his work. While other poets and musicians talked about the union of the two arts, only Campion produced complete songs wholly of his own composition, and only he wrote lyric poetry of enduring literary value whose very construction is deeply etched with the poet's care for its ultimate fusion with music. The development of this composite art was Campion's lifelong project, which made a modest but lasting impression on the modern assessment of the nature of lyric poetry in England in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first two decades of the seventeenth. A practicing physician in his later years, Campion occupied a curious place somewhere between the well-trained courtly amateur and the professional craftsman in poetry, music, and drama--particularly the masque. Although he did...