Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) was part of the extraordinary group of late-Elizabethan sonneteers which included Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), Edmund Spenser (1552-99), Michael Drayton (1563-1631), and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The collections they produced during the last two decades of the sixteenth century constitute a major peak in the history of English lyric verse.
The standard elements of content within these collections – in particular, the adoring and often dejected persona of the speaker, and the wondrous but usually unattainable recipient of his affections – can be traced back to the mediæval troubadour tradition, and to the Roman poets Tibullus (some of whose poems were addressed to a “Delia”), Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid. But the most immediate and obvious
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Citation: Layram, Miles . "Delia". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 September 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5668, accessed 21 November 2024.]
