4 - Publishing and reading poetry

Summary

Only a fool, declared Samuel Johnson scrambling to meet his publisher's deadline in the middle of the eighteenth century, would write except for pay. His sentiment expresses a great change in the status of writing and the nature of the activities that surround it: writing, publishing, disseminating literature, and reading. During the eighteenth century, literature was transformed into mass entertainment.

In earlier centuries, virtually only the privileged and highly educated rankspossessed, wrote, or read written texts. This was especially true of poetry partly because its allusions and intricate syntactic techniques traditionally demand from readers a high level of training and close, sustained attention. As long as literacy and leisure remained limited and printing expensive, poetry was largely the province of the elite. If playwrights like Shakespeare wrote drama for a living and poetry in their spare time, by contrast poets enjoyed an idealized image as sophisticated gentlemen who composed in their spare time or so eighteenth-century poets believed. This image is perhaps epitomized by Sir Philip Sidney, the model of the Renaissance nobleman-author: an amateur equally skilled in literature and war, who penned epics between fighting battles and advising princes. Such poets wrote under the patronage of royalty or members of the high nobility. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship: poets need please only their patrons, and their patrons garnered lasting fame from the poetry they encouraged.