Richard Leigh (poet)

Richard Leigh (1649/50–1728) was an English poet. He belongs to the group known as the metaphysical poets.

He was the younger son of Edward Leigh (1603–1671) and Elizabeth Talbot (died 1707) of Rushall, Staffordshire. He entered Queen’s College, Oxford in 1666 at age sixteen.

Sources rumor that, after school, Leigh left Oxford for London and became an actor in the Duke of York’s or King's Company. There were two other actors named “Leigh” during that period in the company, Anthony Leigh and John Leigh, but no records of a Richard Leigh in either company exist today.

While he was a young man, Leigh wrote a prose tract attacking poet John Dryden (1631–1700), entitled “The Censure of the Rota on Mr. Dryden’s Conquest of Granada”, an attack which annoyed Dryden who subsequently called Leigh ‘the Fastidious Brisk of Oxford’. Some of Leigh’s works include “Poems on Several Occasions and to Several Persons”, “Greatness in Little” (1675), “Sleeping on her Couch”, and “The Eccho”.

His will was dated March 22, 1726, proved on September 12, 1728. He was buried in the chancel of Saint Michael’s Church, Rushall.

Richard Leigh was amongst the British lyric poets of the 17th century known as the metaphysical poets. Though not all the poets of this school were aware of one another, most of them shared an interest in metaphysical matters.

Metaphysical- 1. Based on abstract reasoning; transcending physical matter of the laws of nature. 2. Denoting certain 17th century English Poets known for their subtlety of thought and complex imagery.

Metaphysics- 1. The branch of philosophy concerned with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being and knowing.

Metaphysical Poetry- Highly intellectualized poetry written chiefly in 17th-century England. It is marked by bold and ingenious conceits, complexity, and subtlety of thought, frequent use of paradox, and often deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression. Metaphysical poetry is chiefly concerned with analyzing feeling. It is a blend of emotion and the intellectual ingenuity, characterized by CONCEIT---that is, by the sometimes forced juxtaposition of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem.

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