This edition of some five hundred recently-discovered poems by Mildmay Fane, second Earl of Westmorland presents the largest collection of 'new' seventeenth-century poetry since Traherne's poems were published almost a century ago.
Until the rediscovery of these manuscripts, written between 1625 and 1665, Fane was known only as a patron of Robert Herrick, and as the author of a slim volume of poems, Otia Sacra (1648). This important body of manuscript poetry establishes him as a significant early modern poet.
Fane’s agonised and changing representation of an England turned upside-down and back again, and of its everyday social as well as political life, is meticulously annotated in this first edition. It uses Fane's surviving account books and letters, as well as a wealth of other contemporary information, to contextualise his poems in a way rarely possible with other early modern writers. The resulting text provides fascinating and revealing insights for cultural and political historians, as well as for all readers of English poetry.