Edward Young

Edward Young (1683–1765) was an English poet, dramatist and clergyman. After an early career seeking patronage with satires and tragedies, among them Busiris and The Revenge, he took holy orders and became rector of Welwyn in Hertfordshire. His long blank-verse poem The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, written in the 1740s after a series of bereavements, was immensely popular across Europe and helped inspire the graveyard poets and the Romantics. His Conjectures on Original Composition, which praised originality over imitation, influenced German writers of the Sturm und Drang.