Sir Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh lived several lifetimes in one: soldier, courtier, historian, and the explorer who hunted El Dorado. Poetry was, for him and his Elizabethan circle, a courtier's accomplishment — which makes it remarkable how good he was at it.

"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" is his clear-eyed answer to Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd": flowers fade, gowns wear out, and pretty promises with them. After years imprisoned in the Tower of London, he was executed in 1618; "Even Such Is Time," a meditation on mortality, is said to have been found written in his Bible the night before. At the scaffold he called the axe "a sharp medicine... that cures all diseases."