The almost universal adulation given Edmund Waller in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—an adulation which, often as not, attached to his reform of poetry—has been commonly accepted with little question of the grounds on which it is based. In this essay Alexander Ward Allison presents for the first time a specific analysis of the changes from Jacobean modes which Waller made, suggesting in the course of his analysis that the seventeenth century saw not a dissociation of s...