John Keat's poem. Part I

MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,        5

  But being too happy in thine happiness,—

    That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

          In some melodious plot

  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

    Singest of summer in full-throated ease.        10

John Dryden

(Aldwinkle All Saints, currently United Kingdom, 1613-London, 1700) Poet, playwright and English critic. Belonging to a Puritan family, dropped out before completion and settled in London. He became known in the literary world of the Restoration with a verse play by reason of the death of Cromwell, Heroic Stanzas (Heroic Stanzas, 1659). In 1663 he married the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and that same year he published his first piece of drama, The Wild Gallant (The Gallant will) start of a fruitful career as a playwright that would last until 1693, and resulted in with about thirty dramas in which managed to combine the spirit of Corneille and the French classics with English idiosyncrasies, among them Conquest of Granada (The Conquest of Granada, 1666), Aurengzebe (1675) and All for Love ( All for Love, 1678).

Daniel Defoe

(London, 1660-Moorfields, current UK, 1731) English writer. He abandoned the ecclesiastical career for commerce, first in a textile company, until 1692, and then another brick, activities that led to frequent trips to Europe. In 1695 he joined the government, and in 1701 achieved some success with True English novel in attacking national prejudices in defense of his beloved King William III, of Dutch origin.

Jonathan Swift

(Dublin, 1667-id., 1745) Irish writer. He studied theology at Trinity College Dublin, and after civil war broke out he moved to England, where he obtained the post of secretary of the diplomat Sir William Temple, a distant relative of his mother. He met Esther Johnson, daughter of Temple, who became the target of a series of intimate letters, published posthumously in 1766 under the title Letters to Stella (Journal to Stella), some biographers say he came to marry her secret.

The Faerie Queen

The Faerie Queen is an incomplete epic poem in English written by Edmund Spencer. The first addition was published in 1590 and the second g apart in 1596. The Fairy Queen is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza and is one of the longest poems in English. It is an allegorical work, written in praise of Elizabeth I. Largely symbolic, the poem siguie the work of several knights in an examination of its various virtues.