Thomas Watson (poet)

Thomas Watson (1555–1592) was an English lyrical poet. He wrote in both English and Latin, and was particularly admired for the compositions in Latin. His unusual 18 line sonnets were influential, though their form was not generally imitated.

Watson was the son of William Watson (d. 1559) and Anne Lee (d. 1561). He was educated at Winchester College and Oxford University. He then spent seven years in France and Italy before studying law in London. Though he often signed his works as "student of law", he never practised law as his true passion was literature.

Watson's De remedio amoris, perhaps his earliest important composition, is lost, as is his "piece of work written in the commendation of women-kind", which was also in Latin verse. The earliest surviving work by Watson is a 1581 Latin version of Antigone (Sophocles)|Antigone dedicated to Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel. It also contains an appendix of Latin allegorical poems and experiments in classical metres.

The following year Watson appears for the first time as an English poet in verses prefixed to George Whetstone's Heptameron, and in a far more important work, as the author of the Hecatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love, dedicated to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who had read the poems in manuscript and encouraged Watson to publish them. Also entitled Watson's Passion the work contains over 100 poems in French and Italian styles, including a number of translations. The technical peculiarity of these interesting poems is that, although they appear and profess to be sonnets, they are written in triple sets of common six-line stanza, and therefore have eighteen lines each.

He was recognized for his poetic "Methods and motifs" which occurred between 1580 and 1590. He was held in high regard by his contemporaries even though his style was very similar to his late 15th- and early 16th-century Italian predecessors Sannazaro and Strozzi. He openly drew from Petrarch and Ronsard, with what Sidney Lee describes as "drops of water from Petrarch and Ronsard's fountains." Watson seriously desired to recommend his 18-line form to future sonneteers, but it attracted no imitators in that respect, although The Oxford Companion to English Literature notes that Watson's sonnets "appear to have been studied by Shakespeare and other contemporaries."

...
Wikipedia