Thomas Campion

Thomas Campion 1567-1620, English poet, composer, and lutenist, a physician by profession. Campion wrote lyric poems that he and other composers set to music. His graceful, simple lute songs were published in five Books of Airs (1601-1617). He wrote a treatise on English poetry, condemning the use of rhyme, but he used rhyme freely in his own poems. His treatise A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint (1613) has often been republished.

Bibliography: See biographies by D. Lindley (1986) and W. R. Davis (1987).

Campion, Thomas (1567–1620), poet, musician, and doctor. In 1595 he published his Latin Poemata and between 1613 and 1617 four Bookes of Ayres, with many settings composed by himself, and his Songs of Mourning for Prince Henry. His Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) defended classical metres against ‘the vulgar and unarteficiall custome of riming’. In the early years of James I's reign he wrote a number of court masques.

Campion Thomas, [ Thomas Campian] (b London, 1567; d Witham, 1620). Eng. composer, poet, lawyer, and physician. Admitted to Gray's Inn 1586 and from 1588 took part in plays and masques. Pubd. first Book of Ayres, with a group by Rosseter, 1601, following it with 4 more (1610–12) in which he wrote both mus. and words, with lute acc. Wrote several masques for perf. at James I's court, critique of Eng. poetry, and treatise on counterpoint (1613)—a prototype ‘Elizabethan man’, proficient in all the arts.