Sir Richard Blackmore

Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) was an English physician and poet. He practised medicine in London, became a Fellow of the College of Physicians, and served as physician in ordinary to William III, who knighted him in 1697. He is best known for his heavily moralising epics Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697), and for the philosophical poem Creation (1712). His first epic, Prince Arthur, is included here in full, from the 1695 first edition.

His verse was a favourite target of Dryden and Pope, and he became a byword for dull ambition in the satirical tradition. The poems here come from A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1700), which turns the chapters of Job, with the songs of Moses and Deborah, David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, four psalms, five chapters of Isaiah and the third chapter of Habakkuk, into rhymed English verse. The text follows the 1700 printing, with its original spelling.