Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T19:12:49.735Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Political, satirical, didactic and lyric poetry (II): after Pope

from PART II - LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
John Sitter
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

Poetry of the later eighteenth century is ‘after Pope’ creatively as well as chronologically. Much of it imitates, alludes to or reacts against the great poet of the first half of the century. Given how controversial Pope was in his own age, from the early Essay on Criticism (1711) to the final Dunciad (1743), it is remarkable that his name occurs nearly as frequently in poetry of the second half of the century. Pope's influence extends nearly everywhere in the decades following his death, from the work of younger contemporaries such as Mary Leapor, Joseph Warton, Thomas Warton, Mary Jones, Mark Akenside and Thomas Gray, who published mainly in the 1740s and 1750s, to later poets publishing major works in the 1780s, such as William Cowper and George Crabbe. Writers of such strength as Samuel Johnson and Christopher Smart, who both wrote early verse indebted to Pope, may seem to have outgrown his influence. But it seems likely that the mature Johnson would have written more than two major verse satires had Pope not written so many, and that the oracular eccentricity of Smart's later style flows in part from a need to distance himself from the conversational urbanity Pope had perfected.

Characterising the period in other respects has proven more difficult, and arguably the study of its poetry has suffered as a result. Assumptions that the period is ‘burdened’ by ‘anxiety’, that it is the ‘Age of Sensibility’, or that its most important features are ‘pre-Romantic’ all present problems that go beyond terminology.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 287 - 315
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Coleridge, E. H.ed., The Complete Poetical Works, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), vol. II.Google Scholar
Akenside, Mark, Poetical Works, ed. Dix, Robin, Cranbury, NJ, and london: Associated University Presses, 1996.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Isobel, and Blain, Virginia (eds.), Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820, London and New York: Macmillan Press and St Martin's Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia Aikin, Poems, ed. McCarthy, William and Kraft, Elizabeth, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Bate, W. J., The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, T. E., ‘Eighteenth-Century Reflexive Process Poetry’, Eighteenth Century Studies 10 (1976).Google Scholar
Brett, R. L. and Jones, A. R. (eds.), Lyrical Ballads (London: Methuen, 1963, rev. 1965)Google Scholar
Churchill, Charles, Poetical Works, ed. Grant, Douglas, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.Google Scholar
Cowper, William, Poems, ed. Baird, John D. and Ryskamp, Charles, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–95.Google Scholar
Crabbe, George, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Dalrymple-Champneys, Norma and Pollard, Arthur, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Davie, Donald, The Eighteenth-Century Hymn in England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Doody, Margaret Anne, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Erskine-Hill, Howard, Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fairer, David, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789, London and New York: Longman, 2003.Google Scholar
Fairer, David and Gerrard, Christine (eds.), Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Edition, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004.Google Scholar
Fulford, Tim, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleckner, Robert F., Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Griffin, Dustin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Griffin, Dustin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Hutchings, W. B., and Ruddick, William (eds.), Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Kaul, Suvir, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.Google Scholar
Knapp, Steven, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lonsdale, Roger (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Lonsdale, Roger (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Lonsdale, Roger (ed.), The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, London: Longmans, 1969.Google Scholar
McCarthy, B. Eugene, Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Rosenheim, Edward W., Swift and the Satirist's Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Rothstein, Eric, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660–1780, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.Google Scholar
Sitter, John (ed.), Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Sitter, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smart, Christopher, Poetical Works, ed. Williamson, Karina and Walsh, Marcus, 4 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–7.Google Scholar
Spence, Joseph, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. Osborn, James M., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Spence, Joseph, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. Osborn, James, 2 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Temple, William, ‘Of Poetry’ [1690], in Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. Monk, Samuel Holt, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Tillotson, Geoffrey, Augustan Poetic Diction, London: Athlone Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Warton, Joseph, Odes on Various Subjects, London: R. Dodsley, 1746.Google Scholar
Weinbrot, Howard, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Woodman, Thomas, Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, ed. Cornford, Stephen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×