SOURCE: Howard, Clare. Introduction to The Poems of Sir John Davies: Reproduced in Facsimile from the First Editions in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, pp. 3-28. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.

In the following essay, Howard provides an overview of Davies's life and works.

In every generation of poets there is one who is not concerned with his loves and sorrows, or with the shy eglantine, or with lilies and the moaning sea; there is one who longs to put into succinct and lasting form his estimate of the universe. Such a one was Sir John Davies. His Nosce teipsum was to the sixteenth century what Gray's Elegy was to the eighteenth and Tennyson's In Memoriam was to the nineteenth, a contemplation which reflected some of the best thought of the period. Davies's poem went into five editions during his lifetime.

Nor did his accomplishment...