William Diaper

English clergyman, poet and translator

William Diaper (1685–1717) was an English clergyman, poet and translator of the Augustan era. Having taken the wrong political side at a time of regime change, he lost the patrons who were advancing his career and died in obscurity shortly afterwards.

Biographical details for William Diaper are sparse. He was born in Bridgwater, the son of Joseph Diaper, and attended Balliol College, Oxford in 1699 as a poor scholar (pauper puer), and took his BA degree in 1705. In 1709 he was ordained as a deacon and became a curate in the parish of Brent Knoll, overlooking the Somerset Levels, which he made the subject of his humorous first poem. His next set of poems, the innovative Nereides, or Sea Eclogues, was published in 1712 and earned him entry into the London literary world. In particular Diaper came to the notice of Jonathan Swift, who mentions the poet at this time in his A Journal to Stella. In March 1712 he reported: "Here is a young fellow has writ some Sea Eclogues, poems of Mermen, resembling pastorals of shepherds, and they are very pretty, and the thought is new I must do something for him, and get him out of the way. I hate to have any new wits rise, but when they do rise I would encourage them; but they tread on our heels and thrust us off the stage." In December he introduced Diaper and his new poem to the politician Henry St John and to the Somerset Member of Parliament William Wyndham through their Society of Brothers. Also referred to by Swift as the Brothers’ Club, it represented Tory opinion at ministerial level and included as another poet Matthew Prior. Swift described Diaper at this time as "a poor little short wretch" for whom he hoped to arrange ordination. Then in the following month he went to see Diaper "in a nasty garret, very sick" and gave him twenty guineas from his new patrons. During his stay in London, Diaper was trying to establish his literary reputation in other ways too. He collaborated with a group of authors in translating the Neo Latin poem Callipaedea or the Art of getting beautiful Children by the physician Claude Quillet (1602–61), sharing the translation of its fourth book with Samuel Cobb. He also espoused the Tory politics of his new friends and celebrated the Treaty of Utrecht in his poem "Dryades, or the nymphs prophecy" (1713). Thanks to the support of his patrons, Diaper moved on to become curate at Deane, Hampshire, and also at Crick, Northamptonshire, by 1714. In that year he dedicated his "Imitation of the Seventeenth Epistle of the First Book of Horace" to Swift and refers to his Hampshire parsonage there. However, the Tory ministry on which he depended collapsed soon after and, with the accession of George I to the throne and the new administration that supported him, all further hope of advancement disappeared. Meanwhile, Diaper had begun a translation project on his own account, taking up another marine theme in the Halieutica, a didactic poem on sea fishing by Oppian. He was still in ill health, however, and died by 1717, having only translated the first two books. The work was completed by John Jones, a fellow from his old college, and published by the university in 1722.

During the course of the 18th century, Diaper's work was not wholly forgotten, despite his early death. Swift's friend Alexander Pope, less impressed by Diaper's poetical abilities, included him in the diving episode in the 1728 version of The Dunciad:Far worse unhappy D[iape]r succeeds,He search’d for coral, but he gather'd weeds. Perhaps due to Swift's intervention, however, this mention disappeared from later revised editions of the poem. It must be admitted, though, that Diaper was republished later only in obscure 18th century miscellanies: "The Dryades" in The Poetical Calendar (1763), and the Nereides in John Nichols’ A Select Collection of Poems (1782). The satirical "Brent" was not published at all during Diaper's lifetime and, when it was, not always under that title. But it was well enough known for passages from it to be interpolated as illustration of a point by the translator of Travels of the Jesuits (1767). Diaper's late appearance in John Nichols’ Select Collection was owing to the enthusiasm of Joseph Warton, but all this was not enough to save his name from oblivion for the next century and a half. Samuel Johnson did not include him in Lives of the Poets (1779–81), nor did Diaper appear in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900). Henry Marion Hall included consideration of Diaper's Nereides in his monograph Idylls of Fishermen (Columbia University, 1912), claiming them as "piscatory eclogues" in a genre descending from Idyll XXI of Theocritus, a claim disputed by Diaper's eventual editor. This came about after the poet's reputation was revived in the mid 20th century by the critic Geoffrey Grigson, who devoted an enthusiastic radio talk to Diaper and later included it in his book of essays, The Harp of Aeolus (1947). As a result of his suggestion, the subsequent edition of Diaper's poems was published in 1952. Thereafter critical studies began to be devoted to his work and a later poetical tribute by George Szirtes, "Airs for William Diaper", celebrating his writing on fish, was included in Szirtes’ New and Collected Poems (2008).