Sir Walter Raleigh Essay examples -- Biography

Sir Walter Raleigh was born in Hays Barton England in 1552, and died in London England on October 29 (Miguel 918). He was a soldier, a courtier, an entrepreneur, and an explorer. These phases of his life lead to poetic works, and to a rounded view of the English court (Sauer 130). Sir Walter Raleigh not only gathered his experiences from life but he also analyzed every aspect of life as he wrote his poetry. Raleigh’s poems are sites of struggles and attempts to write him into the world (Miguel 922). He considered his life to be a poem, as a bold gesture, and his poems were the events of his political role and his political ambitions (Miguel 919). One of the interesting things about Raleigh’s verse is the number of times he seems to be writing under pressure of strong emotion, with the feeling of abandonment (Kilvert 148). His sentences are repetitive, but he is the master of telling the phrase and gives a very strong sense of participation in the event he is describing (Kilvert 150). Raleigh’s poems are the combination of the ruthless and sometimes obvious struggle for power that created and held together the court of Elizabeth (Ebsco). â€Å"Most of his poems look like delicate, even trivial, songs, complaints, and compliments typical of Petrarchanism (Miguel 918).† Usually, Raleigh has control of mood, movement, and voice modulation, some of the poems are, however, very revealing about their cultural source (Miguel 920). â€Å"The surface of his poetry presents the typical personality of the Petrarchan lyric – hope and despair, pleasure and fortune, fake love, frail beauty, fond shepherds, coy mistresses, deceitful time (Miguel 920).† Raleigh’s poems are those of a gifted young poet – seemingly casual compliment, occasional verse typica... ... Raleigh never reproaches the Indians for their religion nor congratulates himself upon the prospect of saving souls (Kilvert 152). Nobody denied his imagination, but it is perhaps true that he lacked judgment (Kilvert 145). â€Å"There is a sense in which we should speak of â€Å"Raleigh† as the symptomatic court poet, rather than Raleigh the poet – or, perhaps, of â€Å"Raleigh† and â€Å"his† poems alike as texts, requiring always to be read against what they seem to articulate, often speaking out in their silences, in what they cannot or dare not say but nevertheless manage to express (Ebsco).† Throughout Sir Walter Raleigh’s life, he expressed the major events of his life and the feelings he had towards those events in his poetry. He was a soldier, a courtier, an entrepreneur, and an explorer. These major events or occupations led to the inspiration of his interest in writing.