John Oldham (poet)

John Oldham (9 August 1653 – 9 December 1683) was an English satirical poet and translator. John Dryden, England's first Poet Laureate, was one of his admirers and upon his death wrote an elegy "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham".

Life and work

Oldham was born in Shipton Moyne, Gloucestershire, the son of John Oldham, a non-conformist minister, and grandson of John Oldham the staunch anti-papist rector of Shipton Moyne and before that of Long Newnton in Wiltshire. He was educated first at Tetbury Grammar School, then at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where the Principal was Thomas Tully, an ex-headmaster from Oldham's school at Tetbury. Tully was "a person of severe morals, puritanically inclin'd and a strict Calvinist".

Oldham received a B. A. degree in May 1674. He became an usher at the Whitgift School in Croydon, Surrey (now in Greater London), a position that was poorly paid, monotonous and left little time for him to compose poetry; his discontent at the time was expressed in these lines from one of his satires – "To a friend about to leave University":

But who would be to the vile drudgery bound

Where there so small encouragement is found?

Where you for recompense for all your pains,

Shall hardly reach a common fiddler's gains?

For when you've toiled and laboured all you can,

To dung and cultivate a barren brain,

A Dancing-Master shall be better paid,

Tho' he instructs the Heels and you the Head. at a time when popular anger was being stirred up against Catholics in England by the "Popish Plot". In 1680, he became, for a short time, tutor to the son of Sir William Hicks, through whom he made the acquaintance of the notable physician Dr. Richard Lower. Under Lower's influence, Oldham took up the study of medicine for a year, before returning to poetry. written in 1678, and "A Satire against Virtue", written in 1679. During his lifetime, his poetry was published anonymously. His translations of Juvenal were published after his death. Oldham has been criticised for weaknesses in his rhyming and rhythm; but the critic Ken Robinson (1980) notes, "Oldham chose the rugged style of most of his satires: it was not imposed upon him by incapacity or carelessness."

Death

thumb|220px|[[St Edmund's Church, Holme Pierrepont]]

It was here that Oldham died of smallpox at Holme Pierrepont, on 9 December 1683, aged only 30. He may also have suffered from tuberculosis during his lifetime. The Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull had a monument, possibly designed by Grinling Gibbons, erected over Oldham's grave in St Edmund's Church, Holme Pierrepont.