Chapter 10 - Johnson’s Poetry

Summary

By considering several of Johnson’s critical essays on poetry, this chapter compares his criticism of poetry with his own practice. In his lives of Milton and Gray, Johnson emphatically rejects poetics that employ language, images, and situations distinct from ordinary experience and normal speech. Milton and Gray are found wanting in this regard, with “Lycidas” ridiculed for its pastoral fiction and Gray indicted for thinking that poetry should be written in language remote from common speech. In treating London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson’s two imitations of Juvenal’s Roman satires, Richetti explores their differences from the Roman originals and shows how Johnson’s poems share many qualities with his occasional verse, written for friends to mark personal events, sometimes satirically, more often affectionately. The Vanity offers readers Johnson’s verse at its most powerful, unsparing in its renditions of the human condition, giving common language a vivid and almost terrifying concrete particularity.