SOURCE: “The Poetry,” in Sir Walter Ralegh, Longmans, Green and Co., 1953, pp. 72-126.

In the following essay, Edwards considers the defining characteristics of Raleigh's poetry.

General Characteristics

Ralegh's was not a mind that considered too curiously in poetry, that worried intricate and subtle problems or often took wing on flights of high imagination. He takes broad and general themes and paints with a broad brush. ‘Joy’ and ‘woe’ are precise enough emotions for him, and ‘sweet spring’ and ‘parched ground’ definite enough images. He chooses the time-honoured commonplaces, the transitoriness of life, the instability of happiness and the impermanence of youth, Time the destroyer, the vanity of desire, love betrayed, corruption in society. It is not for novelty or originality, for brilliance of wit, for the excitement of unconventional concepts, for the recondite, that we turn to Ralegh's poetry; it is for his emphatic, compelling, echoing, re-expression of...