“These poems are powerful, moving an original. There is clarity, honesty and delightful quirkiness. He captures-he recaptures-the human situation. He is just as shocking, radical and aggravating, in his way, as language poets, for instance, are in theirs. He makes it almost possible-let me say possible-for a well-educated generalist to read poetry again. A lovely volume.”
Richard Cecil was a leading Evangelical Anglican clergyman of the 18th and 19th centuries. His father was an Anglican while his mother was a Dissenter, whose family had been devout Christians for generations.
He later became minister of two small livings in Lewes, Sussex. After the death of his parents, he moved, because of bad health, to Islington, London and preached at different churches and chapels there. For some years he preached a lecture at Lothbury at 6 o'clock on a Sabbath morning, and later an evening lecture in Orange Street, followed by the chapel in Long Acre. From 1787 he preached the evening lecture at Christ Church, Spitalfields.
In 1788 he became minister of St John's Chapel, Bedford Row, which became a major Evangelical Anglican venue continuing into the mid 19th century.
... Show more