samuel butler

English - English

Definition of samuel butler in English English dictionary: born Feb. 8, 1612, Strensham, Worcestershire, Eng. died Sept. 25, 1680, London British poet and satirist. He held several clerical positions, where he could observe cranks and scoundrels like those whose antics he targeted. He is famous for Hudibras (1663-78), a mock-heroic poem skewering the fanaticism, pretentiousness, pedantry, and hypocrisy he saw in militant Puritanism. It is the most memorable burlesque poem in English and the first English satire that successfully attacked ideas rather than personalities. born Dec. 4, 1835, Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, Eng. died June 18, 1902, London British novelist, essayist, and critic. Descended from distinguished clergymen, he grappled for many years with Christianity and evolution, first embracing, then rejecting, Charles Darwin's theories in his writings. He is best known for The Way of All Flesh (1903), his autobiographical novel that tells, with ruthless wit and lack of sentiment, the story of his escape from the suffocating moral atmosphere of his home circle. In his lifetime his reputation rested on the utopian satire Erewhon (1872), which foreshadowed the end of the Victorian illusion of eternal progress

samuel butler