Straightforward, unornamented mode (plain style).

One of the era's "silver poets", a group of writers who resisted the Italian Renaissance influence of dense classical reference and elaborate poetic devices. His writing contains strong personal treatments of themes such as love, loss, beauty, and time. Most of his poems are short lyrics that were inspired by actual events.

Sometimes expresses a contemptus mundi (contempt of the world) attitude more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the dawning era of humanistic optimism. Pastoral.

Landed gentleman, writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy and explorer.

At the age of only fifteen Raleigh volunteered France’s Huguenot army. Later, in 1572 he was listed as an undergraduate at Oxford, where he studied before going to France, and his name appears in the registry of the Middle Temple in 1575. Raleigh, his brother Carew, and their half brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert outfitted a large fleet set on a “voyage of discovery” in 1578. The short lived project was soon deserted, and by 1580 Raleigh was in Ireland fighting the Munster rebellion.  Raleigh returned to England in 1581, and soon became a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I. There is a popular myth that he once placed his cloak in the mud for Queen Elizabeth I, however, the friendship is generally credited to Raleigh’s charisma.  With the Queen’s favor he was given a wine monopoly in 1583 and several estates in Ireland, which was English owned in the same year he was knighted, 1585. Two years later he was appointed captain of the queen`s guard, and was constantly attending to the Queen. His expeditions under her name resulted in the lost colony of Roanoke Island in present day North Carolina, and in 1589 he left the court and went to Ireland. There he met Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queen. Raleigh’s sponsorship allowed Spenser to complete the work, and one of his sonnets,  Methought I Saw the Grave Where Laura Lay which prefaces it. 

In  1592 he returned to the court but was soon imprisoned for his secret marriage to maid of the court, Elizabeth Throckmorton. He was released later that year when members of his expedition returned with an immense amount of Portuguese treasures. Raleigh sat in Parliament, where he achieved great notoriety for his connection with the poetic group known as the “School of Night.”  Thomas Harriot, a leader of the group, tutored him. Their literal interpretations of scripture gave them a reputation of atheism. 

In 1595 Raleigh and Laurence Kemys set out to find El Dorado, and reached as far as Guiana, which provided them with a fair amount of gold to bring home. Within the next year he published Discovery of Guiana. By 1600 he was governor of Jersey, but only three years later Raleigh was found guilty on a plot with Spain against England the involved the assassination of the king. He was held in the Tower of London, where he began his unfinished The History of the World in 1614. He was released two years later on a reprieve. After a few failed Spanish missions Raleigh returned home to England, where he was executed on the earlier charge of treason. Along with his contribution to history his most famous literary contributions include An Epitaph of Sir Philip Sidney, Even Such is Time, and Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son. A. Latham produced the standard edition of his Poems in 1951.

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