Waller, EDMUND, poet, was born of an ancient and wealthy family at Coleshill near Amersham in a detached portion of Hertfordshire, 3d March 1606. A maternal uncle was the father of John Hampden, and married Elizabeth Cromwell, aunt of the great Oliver, but a devoted royalist throughout. Waller had his education at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and is usually said to have been returned member for the borough of Agmondesham (Amersham) in the short-lived parliament of 1621-22. A likelier date is 1624; certainly he was returned for Chipping-Wycombe in 1625, for Agmondesham in 1627. At five-and-twenty he cut out Ann Banks, a wealthy London heiress, from the fortune-hunters about court, but she soon afterwards died, leaving him free to sing the praises of his famous Saccharissa—the beautiful Lady Dorothy Sidney, eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester. His suit was spurned, and not more successful was his wooing of Amoret, supposed to be the Lady Sophia Murray. Long afterwards, in her old age, Saccharissa, meeting the poet one day, asked him when he would again write verses upon her: 'When you are as young, madam, and as handsome as you were then,' he replied. Waller was again returned for Amersham to the famous Long Parliament, and he seems in the great constitutional struggle to have tried the difficult task of sitting on both sides. He spoke well, and was chosen by the house to conduct the impeachment of Crawley for his judgment in the ship-money case. But his heart was with the king, and it is probable that he was gained over even before his visit as one of the commissioners to Charles at Oxford in 1643. He now plunged into a dubious plot on the king's behalf, and as soon as it was discovered was arrested and expelled the House. He showed himself an abject coward, eager to confess not only all he knew but all he suspected, and his sentence of death was commuted into a fine of £10,000 and banishment for life. He lived at Rouen, in Switzerland, and in Paris, travelled six months in company with Evelyn, and was as popular among the impoverished exiles for his hospitality as his wit. He was permitted to return in 1652. Cromwell appears to have liked to talk with him, and certainly Waller's famous panegyric is his sincerest and almost his best poem. In 1661 he sat for Hastings, and in later parliaments for Chipping-Wycombe and Saltash in Cornwall. He was ready with his congratulation, 'Upon His Majesty's Happy Return,' and, when the king complained that it was inferior to the panegyric on the Protector, replied with matchless readiness and wit, 'Poets, sir, succeed better in fiction than in truth.' Waller continued to the end a favourite at court, where his water-drinking was forgiven for his wit. He was anxious to become Provost of Eton, but as laymen were excluded by statute was hindered by Clarendon. He tried to revenge himself upon the minister in the moment of his fall, but had his reward in the elaborate character limned by the historian, in which his cowardice and meanness are gibbeted to all posterity. He died at his house at Beaconsfield, 21st October 1687, and was buried there. He left by his second wife a large family of sons and daughters.
Waller's poems, which are mostly of the occasional character, were widely circulated, but not published till 1645—again in 1664. His feeble character, out of place in that resolute age, is reflected in his poetry, which is easy, flowing, felicitous, but lacking in sincerity and strength. Pope has eulogised his sweetness, which word we may allow if we limit its meaning to elegance, ease, and grace, without passion, energy, or creative force. His importance in English poetry is that he revived the heroic couplet, and used it easily in that form which it retained for over a hundred years. Denham felt his influence most strongly, and forms the link between him and the great Dryden.
Editions of Waller are those of Fenton (1729), and Mr G. Thorn Drury in 'Muses Library' (1893). See Mr Gosse's Cambridge lectures, From Shakespeare to Pope (1885); but the extravagant importance given to the influence of Waller is a paradox not to be admitted. See also Julia Cartwright's Saccharissa (1893).