Richard Glover (poet)
Richard Glover (1712 – 25 November 1785) was an English poet and politician.
Life
The son of Richard Glover, a Hamburg merchant, he was born in London and educated at Cheam in Surrey. His mother was a sister of Richard West, Lord Chancellor of Ireland. The young Richard was said to have been something of a favourite of his uncle.
In 1739 he became one of the founding governors for the Foundling Hospital, a charity dedicated to saving children from the plight of abandonment. The success of Glover's Leonidas led him to take an interest in politics, and in 1761 he entered parliament as member for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis. Glover was one of the reputed authors of the Letters of Junius; but his claims, advocated in 1825 by Richard Duppa, are slight.
Works
He wrote in his sixteenth year a poem to the memory of
In 1737, he published an epic poem, Leonidas, which proved highly successful. It retells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BC, drawing heavily on ancient accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. It was commended by the prince of Wales and his court, and celebrated by leading literary figures such as Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Jonathan Swift.[1] Translations into German, French and Danish followed, as did several stage adaptions; and a number of writers across Europe, including Willem van Haren, Abbé Prévost, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Friedrich Schiller cited and praised the poem.[2]
In 1739, Glover published a poem entitled London, or the Progress of Commerce; and in 1740 he published a ballad,
He was also the author of two tragedies, Boadicea (1753) and Medea (1761), written in close imitation of Greek models. The Athenaid, an epic in thirty books, was published in 1787, and his diary, entitled Memoirs of a distinguished literary and political Character from 1742 to 1757, appeared in 1813.
In May 1774, shortly after the death of
References
Notes
- ^ Macgregor Morris 2000, 211-213.
- ^ Macgregor Morris & Degner 2012, 185-192.
- ^ Martin 2005.
Sources
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Glover, Richard". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 137.
- Macgregor Morris, Ian (2000). "To make a new Thermopylae: Hellenism, Greek Liberation and the Battle of Thermopylae", Greece & Rome 47, 211-30.
- Macgregor Morris, Ian, & Degner, Uta (2010). "Événements de circonstance: The Classical Tradition in the Age of Revolution", in M. Oergel (ed.): (Re-)Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France, 186-203. Walter de Gruyter.
- ISBN 0-521-61982-3.
- Nichols, R. H.; Wray, F. A. (1935). The History of the Foundling Hospital. London: Oxford University Press.
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