William Diaper Biography

William Diaper (1685–1717) was an English poet of the Augustan era. Little is known about his life. He was born in Bridgwater, Somerset and attended Balliol College, Oxford as a pauper, where he took his BA in 1702. In 1709 he was ordained a deacon at Wells and became a curate in the parish of Brent, which he describes in disparaging terms in a poem of the same name, calling it "nature's gaol". By 1712, he had made contacts in the London literary world and become a protégé of Jonathan Swift, who refers to the poet several times in his Journal to Stella.

His last major work was a translation of Oppian entitled Halieuticks, which was published posthumously in 1722. He was again desperately ill in 1716, and the circumstances and date of Diaper's death the next year are unknown.

Diaper's most important original work is the Nereides, or Sea-Eclogues (1712), an ingenious attempt to breathe new life into the genre of pastoral poetry by moving it into the marine world. The speakers of the fourteen dialogues in heroic couplets are sea-gods and sea-nymphs. Later the same year, Diaper published Dryades, a topographical poem. Diaper also tried his hand at translation, producing an "imitation" of the seventeenth epistle of the first book of Horace and a version of part of the fourth book of Quillet's Callipaedia. His major work of translation is a rendering of the first two of the five books of the Halieutica, a didactic poem on sea-fishing by the Greek poet Oppian. Since it appeared posthumously, the remaining three books were translated by John Jones.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Diaper's work had sunk into obscurity. His reputation was revived in the mid-20th century by the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson. Diaper's poetry is marked by its unusual sensitivity to nature, particularly the world of sea creatures.