Young, Edward

Young, Edward, 1683–1765, English poet and dramatist. After a disappointing political life he took holy orders about 1724, serving for a time as the royal chaplain before becoming rector of Welwyn in 1730. He achieved great renown in his own time, both in England and on the Continent, for his long poem The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742–45), a Christian apologetic inspired by the deaths of his wife, stepdaughter, and the latter's husband. Besides writing a series of satires, The Universal Passion (1725–28), he was the author of three bombastic tragedies, Busiris (1719), The Revenge (1721), and The Brothers (1753). His last important work was his prose Conjectures on Original Composition (1759).

Bibliography

See his correspondence, ed. by H. Pettit (1972); biography by I. S. Bliss (1969); H. Forster, Edward Young: Poet of the Night Thoughts (1986).

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Young, Edward 

Baptized July 3, 1683, in Upham, near Winchester; died Apr. 5, 1765, in Welwyn, Hertfordshire. British poet.

Young studied law at Oxford University. An adherent of classicism in his early works, he exposed the exhaustion of its principles in his prose essay Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). Young won literary fame with the religious didactic narrative poem The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (parts 1–9, 1742–45). Written in blank verse, Night Thoughts contained sorrowful meditations on the cares and transitoriness of life and on the vanity and futility of human strivings. A classic example of sentimentalist literature, it gave rise to the graveyard school of poetry.

WORKS

The Complete Works, vols. 1–2. London, 1854.
In Russian translation:
Plach, parts 1–2, 3rd ed. [Translated by A. M. Kutuzov.] St. Petersburg, 1812.
Mysli ob original’nom sochinenii. St. Petersburg, 1812.

REFERENCES

Levin, Iu. D. “Angliiskaia poeziia i literatura russkogo sentimentalizma.” In the collection Ot klassitsizma k romantizmu. Leningrad, 1970.
Cordasco, F. Edward Young: A Handlist of Critical Notices and Studies. New York, 1950.