30 July - On this day in 1763 the English poet Samuel Rogers was born.Rogers was one of the most cel
30 July - On this day in 1763 the English poet Samuel Rogers was born.Rogers was one of the most celebrated poets of his day and is perhaps best remembered for The pleasures of memory, about which Byron wrote: ‘His elegance is really wonderful - there is no such thing as a vulgar line in the book’. Rogers’s reputation, however, was later eclipsed by his contemporaries. As Richard Garnett wrote in his entry on Rogers for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘His Augustan metrics and lucidity were valued less highly by Victorian readers than the mystery and darkness of those poets now called Romantic’.The Alexander Turnbull Library holds a small collection of Rogers’s poetry, from first editions of An ode to superstition; with other poems (1786) and The pleasures of memory (1792) to collected editions published in 1827 and 1852, the latter inscribed and presented by Rogers to Caroline Phillips, daughter of the portrait painter Thomas Phillips. -- source link
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