Gabriel Harvey Poems

Gabriel Harvey
Gabriel Harvey (c. 1545 – 1630) was an English writer. The eldest son of a ropemaker from Saffron Walden, Essex, he matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566, and in 1570 was elected fellow of Pembroke Hall. Here he formed a lasting friendship with Edmund Spenser, who may[1] have been his pupil. Harvey was a notable scholar, though his reputation suffered from his quarrel with Thomas Nashe. Henry Morley, writing in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), brought evidence from Harvey's Latin writings showing that he was distinguished by quite other qualities than the pedantry and conceit usually associated with his name. He wanted to be "epitaphed as the Inventour of the English Hexameter," and was the prime mover in the literary clique known as the Areopagus that wanted to impose the Latin rules of quantity on English verse. In a letter to M. Immerito (Edmund Spenser) he says that Edward Dyer and Philip Sidney were helping forward "our new famous enterprise for the exchanging of Barbarous and Balductum Rymes with Artificial Verses." The document includes a tepid appreciation of Spenser's Faerie Queene which had been sent to him for his opinion, and he gives examples of English hexameters illustrative of the principles enunciated in the correspondence. The opening lines--"What might I call this Tree? A Laurell? O bonny Laurell Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto"--afford a fair sample of the success of Harvey's metrical experiments, which were an easy mark for the wit of Thomas Nashe. "He (Harvey) goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another," says Nashe in Strange Newes, and he mimics him in the mocking couplet: "But ah ! what news do you hear of that good Gabriel Huff-Snuff, Known to the world for a fool, and clapped in the Fleet for a rhymer?"


Page 1 of 1    

Poems

Poems Collection - poems, 2021 edition