SOURCE: Pebworth, Ted-Larry. “Sir Henry Wotton's ‘Dazel'd Thus, with Height of Place’ and the Appropriation of Political Poetry in the Earlier Seventeenth Century.” Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 71, No. 2 (April-June 1977): 151-69.

In the essay below, Pebworth examines several versions of Wotton's “Dazel'd Thus, with Height of Place,” contending that this poem about the fall of a courtier was repeatedly appropriated and applied to various disgraced political figures.

That the poems of Sir Henry Wotton present intriguing problems of transmission and text there is no doubt.¹ Two of the sixteen poems now attributed with some certainty to him have received significant attention, J. B. Leishman having examined the confused transmission of “You Meaner Beauties of the Night” and C. F. Main having traced the manuscript history of “The Character of a Happy Life.”² These investigations have led us to distrust the copy text previously accepted as definitive...