Poets and poetry after Pope
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
Eighteenth-century poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747), for
instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a resonant insistence on the imagination and the
passions as poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification
as a medium for poetic expression.
In “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751), Thomas Gray revisited the
terrain of such recent poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and Robert
Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely humane eloquence far beyond his
predecessors’ powers. In later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray successfully
sought close imitation of the original Pindaric form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English,
while developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and renewal. Gray’s fascination with
the potency of primitive art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is part of a
larger movement of taste, of which the contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s
alleged translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically experimental poet is Christopher Smart,
whose renown rests largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during confinement in various
asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to
David (1763) is a rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic vitality with elaborate
structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry
is continually energized by minute alterations of tone, startling conjunctions of material, and a
unique alertness to the mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer of hymns, a
talent in which his major contemporary rival was William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779).
Both are worthy successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in the first half of the
century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write with buoyant humor and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural seclusion the evils of town life. But some of
his most characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense experience of withdrawal and
isolation. His rooted Calvinism caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no hope
of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim precision in his masterly short poem
“The Castaway” (written 1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly toward religious praise and pious
acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and sometimes popular women poets in
the period. “Literary ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected public
figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the growth in publishing generally and, in
particular, by the invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the leading women poets
of the period first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still composed for manuscript
circulation rather than publication. She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published posthumously in 1763. Notable female
poets later in the century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen servant who was
also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired
in their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both of whom wrote much
miscellaneous prose as well as poetry, and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular
in the 1780s.
Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to Robert Burns for his Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson,
Burns demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend a new vitality to the
language of poetry. Although born a poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well
versed in English literary traditions, and his innovations were fully premeditated. His range is
wide, from uninhibitedly passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and religious
hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding
example. His work bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he wrote, and
recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of freedom, both individual and national, and an
instinctive belief in the possibility of a new social order.
Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved distinction in an impressive array of
nondramatic modes, demand attention: Goldsmith and Johnson. Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village
(1770), and the incomplete Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his own death, is
a dazzling series of character portraits in the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of the differing national cultures of
western Europe and the degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a restless
wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own native land, where his brother still dwells. In The
Deserted Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an idealized village community is
ruthlessly broken up in the interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural idyll
destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows its eventual restoration) is at the center of his
greatly popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a deft and energetic
practitioner of the periodical essay, contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays originally published in The Public Ledger in
1760–61, uses the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment tolerantly but
shrewdly on his English experiences. He also produced two stage comedies, one of which, She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible masterpieces of the theater after the
death of Farquhar in 1707.
