Thomas Campion

Thomas Campion (1567-1620) was born in London and educated at Cambridge. He studied law at Gray's Inn, and was both a poet and composer - a contemporary not only of Shakespeare, Drayton, Marlowe and Jonson, but also of Byrd, Morley, Gibbons and Dowland. In 1591, five of his songs appeared in the unauthorised version of Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella". In 1595, he published a collection of Latin epigrams, "Poemata", but he is best known for his lyric poems and settings. Campion wrote over one hundred lute songs, published between 1601 and 1617 in four "Books of Ayres", as well as a treatise on "The Art of English Poesie", and a number of masques. His work was not rediscovered until the nineteenth century; since then, whoever dreams of a poem where language begins to resemble music thinks of Campion.