Thomas Campion (KAM-pee-uhn) wrote a critical essay of poetics, Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), and a book of music theory, A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counter-point (c. 1617), the one work of his that remained in print throughout the seventeenth century.

England has always had a strong claim to one of the finest literatures in the West. Most critics agree, moreover, that the literature of the late English Renaissance—stretching from Edmund Spenser through William Shakespeare to John Milton—was the true golden age. With music, however, it is a different story; usually England imported rather than exported musical ideas. The Germans, George Frideric Handel (later naturalized as a British subject) in the eighteenth century and Felix Mendelssohn in the nineteenth, dominated English music. For two brief periods, however, England was Europe’s musical innovator—the mid-fifteenth century, when John Dunstable’s music taught Continental composers the new style, and the decades spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when William Byrd, Thomas Morley, Thomas Wheelkes, and especially John Dowland ushered in England’s musical golden age. Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528; The Courtier, 1561) advises the Renaissance gentleman to be adept at both poetry and music, and most educated persons had some level of expertise in both, but only one man in that twin golden age deserves to be called both a first-rate poet and a first-rate composer: Thomas Campion. Most composers would either set words by others, as John Dowland did—often producing truly moving music to inferior words, as in his famous “Come heavy sleep”—or they would write their own words with even worse literary results, as Campion’s friend Philip Rosseter did in his half of A Booke of Ayres, which he jointly produced with Campion. Most poets would entitle a work, hopefully, “Song” and wait for a composer to do his share—as John Donne did, for example, in “Song: Goe and Catch a Falling Star.” Campion, however, wrote both words and music and thus is the distillation of the English Renaissance.