Matthew Green Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Overview
Matthew Green (c.1696 c.1737) was an English poet whose small but distinctive body of verse earned him a durable place among the minor voices of the Augustan age. Best known for The Spleen, a polished and gently satirical poem on melancholy and hypochondria, he wrote with a clarity, lightness of touch, and moral poise that reflect the urban literary culture of early eighteenth-century London. Green balanced a civil service career with literary pursuits, leaving behind a reputation for wit and a single work that has been repeatedly anthologized for its elegance and insight into the temper of his time.

Early Life and Background
Precise records of Green's birth and upbringing are sparse, but the most reliable accounts place him in England, within the orbit of the expanding commercial and intellectual life that centered on London. He emerged in a period marked by print growth, coffeehouse debate, and the consolidation of literary taste around refinement and reason. The scarcity of personal documentation has encouraged later readers to take his poems as the clearest testimony about his habits, sensibility, and concerns.

Work at the Custom House
Green is consistently reported to have held a post as a clerk at the Custom House in London. That position situated him at the crossroads of Britain's maritime economy, exposing him daily to the rhythms of trade, the language of accounting and regulation, and a cosmopolitan bustle that fed both conversation and observation. The stability of a government appointment afforded him time for reading and writing, and the collegial setting created a circle of acquaintances who, by several accounts, valued his conversation and later helped preserve and circulate his verse.

Entrance into Letters
Like many writers of his generation, Green first shared poems privately. Manuscript circulation among friends and colleagues was an established path into authorship, and his verses appear to have gained esteem in this intimate sphere before reaching print. The essay culture shaped by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and the satirical energies represented by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, formed the literary horizon against which Green wrote. While firm evidence of personal contact with these prominent figures is limited, their influence permeated the milieu in which he developed his style: urbane, skeptical of fads and pretension, attentive to the moral weather of everyday life.

The Spleen
The Spleen is Green's signature achievement. Turning to the fashionable eighteenth-century diagnosis of "spleen" a catchall for low spirits, morbid reflection, and bodily unease he crafted a poem that mixes sympathetic observation with playful correction. The piece surveys everyday remedies for gloom conversation, fresh air, exercise, moderation, friendship, and the small civilities that keep social life in repair. It is not a medical treatise but a poet's guide to balance, proposing that taste, wit, and measured routine can hold the darker moods at bay. Its texture is polished, alternating brief descriptive flashes with aphoristic turns, and its gentle irony avoids the harsher invective common in contemporary satire. Readers in later generations have prized the poem for articulating a commonsense ethic of self-care long before that phrase became fashionable, and for giving literary form to the period's preoccupation with sensibility without surrendering to it.

Circle, Contemporaries, and Influences
The literary world that surrounded Green included some of the century's most influential voices. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele set standards of polite prose in the Spectator that shaped the taste of London readers and, indirectly, of poets like Green who prized clarity and decorum. Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift demonstrated how verse could distill social critique; their example, broadly diffused through coffeehouse talk and miscellanies, helped define the satirical register within which The Spleen could be appreciated. In Green's immediate orbit were colleagues at the Custom House and friends who valued his conversation and epigrammatic wit; even if many of their names have not survived in print, their role in transmitting his poems after his death has often been noted in accounts of his work.

Later Years and Death
Green's final years seem to have been steady rather than dramatic, occupied by his civil employment and the quiet refinement of his poems. He died around 1737. Evidence suggests that The Spleen appeared in print near the end of his life or soon after, and that friends and admirers had a hand in organizing or safeguarding the text. The lack of extensive correspondence or diaries leaves gaps in the narrative, yet the timing of publication and the poem's polished state indicate a writer who revised carefully and aimed for an audience broader than his immediate circle.

Legacy
Matthew Green's legacy rests on concentration rather than abundance. With one principal poem and a handful of shorter pieces, he secured a reputation as a graceful minor poet of the Augustan period. Anthologists have repeatedly turned to The Spleen for a representative treatment of eighteenth-century melancholy tempered by wit. In a literary age often associated with fierce polemic and formal brilliance, Green's voice occupies a middle register: humane, sociable, skeptical of extremes, and confident that the ordinary arts of living offer proportionate answers to the ordinary pains of existence. Scholars of the period value his work for crystallizing the language of "spleen" and for subtly mapping the boundary between medical fashion and moral habit.

Selected Works and Publication History
The Spleen stands at the center of his oeuvre. Other poems attributed to him circulated in manuscript and occasionally in later collections, typically brief pieces that showcase compact expression and pointed observation. The editorial trail indicates that friends or early admirers were instrumental in bringing his verse to press and in keeping it available through miscellanies, a common pathway for poets whose fame rested on one or two characteristic works.

Character and Reputation
Contemporary notices and later assessments converge on a picture of a man of quiet wit and serene good sense. He appears to have preferred the sociable spaces of office, parlor, and coffeehouse to the more theatrical arenas of public controversy. In style and outlook, he belongs with writers who believed that conversation is a moral art and that poetry should clarify rather than inflame. The Spleen captures that temperament: sympathetic to human frailty, amused by fashionable diagnoses, and committed to the steadying virtues of moderation, friendship, and civility.

Assessment
Though never a commanding figure in the canon, Matthew Green remains a clear presence in the map of eighteenth-century English poetry. He distilled the anxieties of his time into a single, shapely work, and he offered readers an image of equanimity that still feels practical. Set alongside the grander projects of Pope and Swift and within the elegant frame of Addison and Steele's culture of taste, Green's poetry adds a chamber piece to the era's symphony: modest in scale, exact in feeling, and memorable for the poise with which it faces the mind's darker weather.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Matthew, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Overcoming Obstacles.