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Barnabe Googe

(11 June 1540-7 February 1594) was an English poet.

Criticism

Googe intended his translations for the moral and practical education of his countrymen. This was especially the case with Zodiake of Life and Four Books of Husbandry, which drew praise from Googe's Elizabethan contemporaries for their faithfulness to the originals. While Googe was largely forgotten in the century following his death, his poetry was rediscovered in the eighteenth century by literary historians, most of whom condemned his poetic output as unorigional. Only in the twentieth century has the critical assessment of Googe's works become more positive, with critics viewing his lyric poetry as an early example of the plain style favored by later, more prominent poets. Yvor Winters describes “Of Money” as one of the greatest lyric poems of its age, and it has since become one of Googe's most anthologized poems. Nevertheless, studies of Googe's poetry tend to concentrate more on its literary influence than on its intrinsic merits. His poetic output is most often adduced for two purposes: first, to argue for the influence of Tottel's Miscellany, thus demonstrating Googe's importance in leading the transition from religious to personal poetry, and, second, to illustrate his part in introducing the poetic form of the eclogue into English letters.