Prior, Matthew

(1664-1721)

   Thought to have been the son of a joiner from Wimborne, Dorset, he was educated at Westminster School and St. John's College, Cambridge, from where he graduated B.A. in 1686. Two years later was made a fellow there. A diplomat, he was present at the Hague during the negotiations for the Treaty of Ryswick, 1697, which settled the War of the Grand Alliance. In 1711, he was sent to Paris as a se320 cret agent at the time of the negotiation for the Treaty of Utrecht, which was dubbed "Matt's Peace." After the death of Queen Anne, he was impeached and spent a year in prison, but used his time to write poetry. He retired from the diplomatic service to Down Hall, not very far from Harlow, Essex. His monument is in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. At his request he was buried at the feet of Edmund Spenser. "Solomon on the Vanity of the World" (1719) ridicules various systems of philosophy. Some of his other poems: "Advice to the Painter," "Cautious Alice," "Daphne and Apollo," "Pontius and Pontia," "The Advice of Venus," "The Chameleon," "The Wandering Pilgrim."

   Sources: Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714. George de F. Lord, ed. Yale University Press, 1975. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Erotic Poetry: The Lyrics, Ballads, Idylls, and Epics of LoveClassical to Contemporary. William Cole, ed. Random House, 1963. Fellow Mortals: An Anthology of Animal Verse. Roy Fuller, ed. Macdonald and Evans, 1981. Poets of the English Language, Vol. III. W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, eds. Viking Press, 1950. Selected Poems of Matthew Prior. Austin Dobson, ed. Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889. Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior: Volume I and 2, Little, Brown, and Company, 1854. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).