Background
John Pomfre was born in 1667. He was son of Thomas Pomfret, vicar of Luton, Bedfordshire, England.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
John Pomfret
John Pomfret was an English poet and clergyman.
Education
He was educated at Bedford grammar school and at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Career
He became rector of Maulden, Bedfordshire, in 1695, and of Millbrook in the same county in 1702.
He published a number of poems, and was regarded as significant enough in his time to be included by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets.
The Choice or Wish: A Poem written by a Person of Quality (1700) expresses the epicurean desires of a cultivated man of Pomfret's time. It is smoothly written in the heroic couplet, and was widely popular. His Miscellany Poems were published in 1702.
Dr Johnson says that the bishop of London refused to sanction preferment for him because in his Choice he declared that he would have no wife, although he expressed a wish for the occasional company of a modest and sprightly young lady. The poet was married in real life all the same, and - while waiting to clear up the misunderstanding with the bishop - he died in November 1702.
Achievements
-
'The Choice' is the poem for which Pomfret is now probably most remembered, especially as it was chosen by Roger Lonsdale as the first poem in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse.
