Butler, Samuel, 1612–80, English poet and satirist. During the Puritan Revolution he served Sir Samuel Luke, a noted officer of Cromwell. After the restoration of Charles II, he wrote his famous mock-heroic poem Hudibras (pub. in 3 parts, 1663, 1664, 1678), an envenomed satire against the Puritans in which Luke was the model for the butt Sir Hudibras. He was also the author of other verse satires, some of them not published until the 20th cent.
See J. Wilders' edition of Hudibras (1967); biography by T. Penelhum (1985); studies by H. DeQuehen, ed. (1979) and T. L. Jeffers (1981).
