Works
He translated into English heroic couplets the scriptural epic of Guillaume du Bartas.
| “ | Our bisexed Parents, free from sin, In Eden did their double birth begin. |
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—Du Bartas his divine weekes and workes (1608) |
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His Essay of the Second Week was published in 1598; and in 1604 The Divine Weeks of the World's Birth. The ornate style of the original offered no difficulty to Sylvester, who was himself a disciple of the Euphuists and added many adornments of his own invention. The Sepmaines of Du Bartas appealed most to his English and German co-religionists, and the translation was immensely popular. It has often been suggested that John Milton owed something in the conception of Paradise Lost to Sylvester's translation. His popularity ceased with the Restoration, and John Dryden called his verse "abominable fustian."
His works were reprinted by A. B. Grosart (1880) in the Chertsey Worthies Library. See also Charles Dunster, Considerations on Milton's early Reading (1800).
Read more about this topic: Joshua Sylvester
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us. Fortunately, we had no business in this country.”
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“The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary or a stool
To stumble over and vex you ... “curse that stool!”
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)