Thomas Stanley was one of the most learned poets of the seventeenth century. In an age when poets from John Donne to John Milton were impressively educated, Stanley's devotion to classical studies reached beyond the scope of most of his peers. His History of Philosophy (1655-1660) and edition of Aeschylus (1663) were standards through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, while the composition of his love poems, often translations from Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish verse, was for Stanley a scholarly as well as artistic endeavor. Stanley may have felt some conflict between his lyrical flights of fancy and the serious endeavors of scholarship, but fellow poet James Shirley believed that, in the "learned loves" of Stanley's verse, the two--poesy and research--were married.

An early biographer of the poet (in the 1701 edition of The History of Philosophy) warns his reader not to expect from Stanley's life "a...