26 Facts About Richard Blackmore

Sir Richard Blackmore, English poet and physician, is remembered primarily as the object of satire and as an epic poet, but he was a respected medical doctor and theologian.

Richard Blackmore was born at Corsham, in Wiltshire, the son of a wealthy attorney.

Richard Blackmore was educated briefly at Westminster School and entered St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1669 at 15.

Richard Blackmore received his Bachelor of Arts in 1674 and his MA in 1676.

Richard Blackmore was a tutor at the college for a time, but in 1682 he received his inheritance from his father.

Richard Blackmore went to France, Geneva, and various places in Italy.

Richard Blackmore stayed for a while in Padua and graduated in medicine at Padua.

Richard Blackmore had trouble with the College, being censured for taking leave without permission, and he strongly opposed the project for setting up a free dispensary for the poor in London.

Richard Blackmore supported the Glorious Revolution, and Prince Arthur was a celebration of William III.

Nevertheless, it went through three editions and William made Richard Blackmore physician-in-ordinary, gave him a gold medal, and knighted him in 1697.

In 1697, Richard Blackmore followed that with King Arthur: an Heroic Poem in Twelve Books.

Additionally, Richard Blackmore took John Milton as his model, rather than Virgil, and he admitted in his preface that his previous book had been too adherent to the Classical unities.

Richard Blackmore had not only been explicitly partisan in his epics, but he had announced that epic was necessary to counter the degeneracy of poetry written by wits.

Richard Blackmore answered Brown and his friends with Discommendatory verses, on those which are Truly Commendatory, on the Author of the two Arthurs, and the Satyr against Wit.

However, John Dryden accused Richard Blackmore of plagiarizing the idea of an epic on Arthur from him and called him a "Pedant, Canting Preacher, and a Quack" whose poetry had the rhythm of wagon wheels because Richard Blackmore wrote in hackney cabs on his way between patients.

In 1705, with Anne on the throne and William dead, Richard Blackmore wrote another epic, Eliza: an Epic Poem in Ten Books, on the plot by Rodrigo Lopez, the Portuguese physician, against Queen Elizabeth.

Richard Blackmore was a religious author when he was not a political author.

All the same, Richard Blackmore had its issues collected and published as The Lay Monastery in the year the journal foundered.

Richard Blackmore joined the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in America in 1704.

Richard Blackmore wrote Just Prejudices against the Arian Hypothesis, putatively against Deism and Unitarianism in 1721 and then, to help matters, wrote Modern Arians Unmasked in the same year.

Richard Blackmore produced A New Version of the Psalms of David in 1721 and tried to get the Church of England to accept them as canonical translations.

Finally, Richard Blackmore attempted to answer Deism again with Natural Theology, or, Moral Duties Consider'd apart from Positive in 1728.

Richard Blackmore has come down, largely through the verse of Alexander Pope, as one avatar of Dulness, but, as a physician, he was quite forward thinking.

Richard Blackmore agreed with Sir Thomas Sydenham that observation and the physician's experience should take precedence over any Aristotelian ideals or hypothetical laws.

Richard Blackmore wrote on plague in 1720, smallpox in 1722, and consumption in 1727.

Richard Blackmore died in Boxted, Essex and was buried in his local parish church, where a monument was constructed.