Selected Poems of Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel and Sir Walter Ralegh

Campion's lyrics are the fruits of the two Golden ages of Elizabethan art: the musical and the poetic. His ayres wind together or unravel mixed emotions and ethical paradoxes in a striking array of voices from the ardent, stoical or lecherous, to the vengeful, disillusioned or quirky. Daniel refined the language for tangled emotional states, most famously in his sonnet sequence Delia. His poetry shows him shrinking from ambition and beset by self-doubt, while wrestling with historical and moral concerns. Ralegh cut a figure as flamboyant and melodramatic as Daniel's was reluctant. His world was duplicitous and dangerous, and his poetry took the form of a sophisticated game of political and emotional courtship with his female ruler.