Samuel Daniel was born in Somerset, England, in 1562, and attended Magdalen Hall (later renamed Hertford College) at the University of Oxford. During a writing career which was sustained by tutoring work and by various types of patronage, and which included, early on, periods spent in Italy and France, he produced a body of work which is notable for the excellence attained not only within a number of the poems, but also within other types of written composition, including historical narrative and poetic theory.
The literary work for which Daniel is now best-known is the sonnet cycle Delia. Twenty-seven of these lyrics were appended without his permission to a pirated edition of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591, and the following year saw the official publication of the fifty-poem
1575 words
Citation: Layram, Miles . "Samuel Daniel". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 September 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1130, accessed 03 December 2024.]
