SOURCE: Ratcliffe, Stephen. “‘Silent Musick’: The Aesthetics of Ruins.” In Campion: On Song, pp. 3-15. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.

In the essay that follows, Ratcliffe attacks how critics have written about Campion as a composer and poet, arguing they do not address why he is good. Ratcliffe then offers his own analysis of Campion's works.

Praised in his own lifetime, largely forgotten by the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, resurrected in A.H. Bullen's Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age (1887), Thomas Campion now enjoys a secure but minor reputation as one of the finest poets of the English Renaissance. His verse is valued chiefly for its technical mastery, its management of sound, syntax, rhythm and meter, formal and logical structure. Its virtue—a smoothly polished precision, a gracefully delicate charm which has become synonymous with his name—has most often been accounted for by...