Table of Contents

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: Contexts and Perspectives

1: Poetry, Politics, and the Rise of Party

Critical Debates

The Rage of Party under Queen Anne

Hanoverians and Whigs

The Rise of Patriotism

The Collapse of the Bubble

Walpole and His Opponents

The Decline of Patriotism

Wilkes, Churchill, and the Nonsense Club

2: Poetry, Politics, and Empire

England as the Center of the World

Key Terms: Patriotism, Liberty, Luxury, Progress

Nationalist Doubt and Poetic Ambivalence

The Poet as Surveyor – of Britain and the Globe

Poetry and Slavery

3: Poetry and Science

Definitions

Physico-Theology and the New Science

Newton

The Great Chain of Being and Technology

Consuming Science

Women and Science

Politics

Satires

Natural History and Earth Sciences

Sensibility

Romanticism

4: Poetry and Religion

Poetics

Hymnody

Biblical Paraphrase

Universe Poems

5: Poetic Enthusiasm

Dryden and Locke

Dennis

Shaftesbury, Swift, and Astell

Pope

Midcentury Translations

Byrom and Jerningham: Two Poems Named “Enthusiasm”

Postscript: Blake

6: Poetry and the Visual Arts

7: Poetry, Popular Culture, and the Literary Marketplace

8: Women Poets and Their Writing in Eighteenth-Century Britain

“Tuneful Singer, and great Winchilsea”

“Perception Exquisite”: “Stella” and “Lactilla”

“A British Muse”

9: Poetry, Sentiment, and Sensibility

PART II: Readings

10: John Gay, The Shepherd's Week

11: Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock and “Eloisa to Abelard”

12: Jonathan Swift, the “Stella” Poems

“Best Pattern of true Friends, beware”: The Ambivalence of Friendship

“Not the gravest of divines”: The Twist in the Tale

13: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Six Town Eclogues and Other Poems

14: James Thomson, The Seasons

15: Stephen Duck, The Thresher's Labour, and Mary Collier, The Woman's Labour

16: Mary Leapor, “Crumble-Hall”

17: Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination

Didactic Poetry

Models, Influences, Purposes

The Design of the Poem

Pleasures, Perfection, and Politics

Providence, Pleasure, and Virtue

Ridicule, “Truth,” and Memory

Imagination, Creativity, and Divinity

18: Samuel Johnson, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes

19: William Collins, “Ode on the Poetical Character”

Strophe: Fancy's Gift and Chosen Poets

Mesode: Fancy and the Creation

Antistrophe: Milton's Paradise and Collins's Present

Analysis and Synthesis

20: Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard

21: Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

22: Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, and George Crabbe, The Village

Views of the Poor

The Poets and Their Work

23: William Cowper, The Task

24: Robert Burns, “Tam o' Shanter”

PART III: Forms and Genres

25: Rhyming Couplets and Blank Verse

26: Epic and Mock-Heroic

Attitudes Toward Epic

Mock-Heroic

The Heroi-comical Poem

Blackmore and Philips

The Decline of Mock-Heroic

27: Verse Satire

The Nature and Development of Satire

Alexander Pope

Verse Satires 1700–1800: A Brief Commentary

28: The Ode

The Restoration Ode

The Pindaric, the Sublime, and Milton

The Augustan Ode

The Horatian Tradition

The Midcentury Revival

29: The Georgic

Instruction and its Limits

Balance and Proportion

Rhetorical Energies

The Influence of Milton

Progress and Commerce

Moral Economy

Political Applications

Geographical Limits

The Decline of Georgic

30: The Verse Epistle

The Database of Epistles from Literature Online

PART IV: Themes and Debates

31: The Constructions of Femininity

I

II

III

32: Whig and Tory Poetics

Politics and Poetics

Panegyric and Satire

Empire and Poesy

Whig Histories

Liberty and Letters

Poetic Originality and the Whig Sublime

Neoclassical Order

33: The Classical Inheritance

Eighteenth-Century English Poetry and the Classics: An Overview

Eighteenth-Century English Poetry and the Classics: Debates and Dilemmas

Refashioning a Classical Genre: “Eloisa to Abelard”

The Dynamics of Imitation: The Epistle to Augustus

Translation and “Nature”: Helen of Troy in Pope's Iliad

34: Augustanism and Pre-Romanticism

Augustanism

Pre-Romanticism

35: Recovering the Past: Shakespeare, Spenser, and British Poetic Tradition

36: The Pleasures and Perils of the Imagination

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

37: The Sublime

38: Poetry and the City

Swift's City Poems

The Town Eclogue

Urban Georgic

Retirement

Poetry and Urban Print Culture

39: Cartography and the Poetry of Place

The Compass Rose

Emblematic Geography

Coordinate Cartography

Geometric Terrain

40: Rural Poetry and the Self-Taught Tradition

41: Poetry Beyond the English Borders

Index

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. except for editorial material and organization © 2014 by Christine Gerrard

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2006)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to eighteenth-century poetry / edited by Christine Gerrard.

p. cm.—(Blackwell companions to literature and culture ; 44)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-1316-8 (hardback : alk. paper)—ISBN-13: 978-1-118-70229-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4051-1316-2 (hardback : alk. paper)—ISBN-10: 1-118-70229-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. I. Gerrard, Christine. II. Series.

PR553C66 2006

8212.509—dc22

2005034701

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: The Pantheon at Stourhead, Wiltshire, built c.1753; Photo © National Trust Picture Library / Nick Meers

Cover design by RBDA

Paul Baines is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (2000), and The Long Eighteenth Century (2004), and co-editor of Five Romantic Plays 1768–1821 (2000).

Ros Ballaster is a Fellow and Tutor in English at Mansfield College, Oxford University. She is the author of Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction 1674–1740 (1992) and Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (2005).

Richard Bradford is Professor of English at the University of Ulster. His most recent books include A Complete Critical Guide to John Milton (2001), Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis (2001), Augustan Measures: Restoration and Eighteenth Century Writings on Prosody and Metre (2002), and First Boredom Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (2005).

Gerard Carruthers is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Robert Burns (2005) and co-editor of a critical edition of Walter Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses (2004) and English Romanticism and the Celtic World (2003).

Caryn Chaden is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of articles on Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Mary Leapor.

Rachel Crawford is Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. She is author of Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape 1700–1830 (2002). Her current research project focuses on the function of Siam as Place in the British imagination.

Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Sensibility (1996), The History of Gothic Fiction (2000), and The Coffee House: A Cultural History (2004), and is co-editor with Brycchan Carey and Sara Salih of Discourses of Slavery and Abolition (2004).

David Fairer is Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Pope's Imagination (1984), The Poetry of Alexander Pope (1989), and English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (2003). He is the editor of Pope: New Contexts (1990), The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (1995), and, with Christine Gerrard, Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (1999; 2nd edn. 2004).

Christine Gerrard is Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. She is the author of The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (1994) and Aaron Hill: The Muses' Projector, 1685–1750 (2003). She is the co-editor, with David Fairer, of Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (1999; 2nd edn., 2004).

John Goodridge is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (1995) and general editor of the Pickering & Chatto series “English Labouring Class Poets.”

Mina Gorji is a Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford University. She is writing a study of John Clare and vernacular poetry and editing a collection of essays for Routledge, Rude Britannia, on the cultures and values of rudeness in modern Britain.

Charlotte Grant was Senior Research Fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. She is co-editor with Elizabeth Eger, Clíona O' Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton of Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700–1830 (2001), editor of Flora (2003), and co-editor with Jeremy Aynsley of Imagined Interiors (2006).

Isobel Grundy is a Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta. She is author of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (1986), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment (1999), and (with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1990). She is a joint author of the forthcoming electronic history of women's writing in the British Isles produced by the Orlando Project (director: Patricia Clements).

Brean Hammond is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is author of Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740 (1997) and Making the Novel (2006). He is the author of several books and many articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing.

David Hopkins is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. Among his recent publications are (as author) Writers and Their Work: John Dryden (2004) and (as editor), with Paul Hammond, volume 5 of The Poems of John Dryden (2005) and, with Stuart Gillespie, volume 3 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (2005).

Shaun Irlam is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature of the University at Buffalo, where he has taught since 1993. His research and teaching focus on the role of colonialism and empire in literary and intellectual discourses of the eighteenth century. His book Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain was published in 1999. He also teaches postcolonial theory and literatures with specific emphasis on Africa.

Freya Johnston belongs to the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. She is author of Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709–1791 (2005).

Robert Jones is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (1998). More recent articles have explored Anna Laetitia Barbauld and James Boswell, Thomas Chatterton, Joshua Reynolds, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He is currently working on a book on British responses to the American War of Independence.

George Justice is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century England (2002) and co-editor, with Nathan Tinker, of Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (2002).

Suvir Kaul is Professor of English and Director of the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire (2000) and co-editor, with Ania Loomba, Antoinette Burton, Matti Bunzl, and Jed Esty, of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005).

Bridget Keegan is Professor of English at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. She is the editor of Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 2: 1740–1780 (2003) and, with James McKusick, Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of British and American Nature Writing (2000). She has published numerous articles on British laboring-class poetry, in particular laboring-class writing about nature.

Jennifer Keith is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper (2005) and essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry.

Kathryn R. King is Professor of English at the University of Montevallo in Alabama. She is author of Jane Barker, Exile (2000) and co-editor, with Alex Pettit, of Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (2001), and has published widely on women writers of the early eighteenth century. She is currently at work on a critical biography of Eliza Haywood.

Margaret M. Koehler is Assistant Professor of English at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio. She is working on a book about personification in Restoration and early eighteenth-century poetry.

Clark Lawlor is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (forthcoming 2006) and editor of Sciences of Body and Mind (2003), volume 2 in Literature and Science, 1660–1834, gen. ed. Judith Hawley (8 vols.), and has written various articles on literature and science in the long eighteenth century.

Emma Mason is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (2006) and, with Mark Knight, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006). She is also a co-editor of two forthcoming volumes on biblical hermeneutics: The Oxford Handbook to the Reception History of the Bible and Blackwell's Companion to the Bible in English Literature.

John D. Morillo is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. He is the author of Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (2001), as well as articles on Dennis, Pope, Shelley, Southey, and Scott. He served as Director of Graduate Studies in English from 2001 to 2005.

Chris Mounsey is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester. Chris has written and taught extensively on eighteenth-century literature. Book publications include Christopher Smart: Clown of God and Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture, both from Bucknell University Press. Chris is editor of the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and also organizer of its annual conference.

Bill Overton is Professor of Literary Studies at Loughborough University. He is the author of The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction 1830–1900 (1996) and Fictions of Female Adultery: Theories and Circumtexts 1684–1890 (2002), and the editor of A Letter to My Love: Love Poems by Women First Published in the Barbados Gazette, 1731–1737 (2001). He is currently completing a book-length study of the eighteenth-century British verse epistle.

Juan Christian Pellicer is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Oslo. Since completing a doctoral thesis on John Philips (2002) he has published articles on eighteenth-century georgic and related topics, and currently contributes the section on eighteenth-century poetry in The Year's Work in English Studies. With John Goodridge he has edited Philips's Cyder (2001), and a further collaborative edition of John Dyer's The Fleece is now in preparation. A chapter on pastoral and georgic 1660–1790 for the forthcoming Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature is also in progress.

Murray Pittock is Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature and Head of the Department of English and American Studies at Manchester University. His main publications are in the area of nationality and identity, and include A New History of Scotland (2003), Scottish Nationality (2001), Celtic Identity and the British Image (1999), Jacobitism (1998), Inventing and Resisting Britain (1997), The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (1995, 1999), Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (1994), and The Invention of Scotland (1991). He is currently working on a number of projects, including The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, James Boswell: The Political Correspondence, and The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe for the British Academy's Reception of British Authors project.

Adam Rounce is Research Fellow, at Keele University, for the Cambridge edition of the works of Jonathan Swift. He has edited Alexander Pope and His Critics (2003) and The Selected Poetry of Charles Churchill (2003), and published articles on Dryden, Johnson, Akenside, Cowper, Warburton, and Churchill. He is currently writing a book on the idea of literary failure in the eighteenth century.

Valerie Rumbold is Reader in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Women's Place in Pope's World (1989) and editor of Alexander Pope: The Dunciad in Four Books (1999). She is one of the editors of the forthcoming Pope in the Longman Annotated English Poets series, and is currently editing the volume Parodies, Hoaxes, Treatises, Mock-Treatises for the Cambridge edition of the works of Jonathan Swift.

John Sitter is the Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His books include Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth Century England (1982), Arguments of Augustan Wit (1991), and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (2001).

Richard Terry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sunderland. He is the author of Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (2001) and Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse (2005), as well as numerous essays on eighteenth-century topics. He is currently working on the practice and allegation of plagiarism during the long eighteenth century.

David F. Venturo, Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, is author of Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson (1999) and editor of The School of the Eucharist. With a Preface Concerning the Testimony of Miracles (forthcoming), and has written extensively on British literature and culture, 1640–1830. He helps to edit ECCB. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography and The Scriblerian, and is writing a book, Fall'n on Evil Days: Alienation and Protest in Milton, Dryden, and Swift.

Abigail Williams is a Fellow and Tutor in English at St Peter's College, Oxford University. She is the author of Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1715 (2005) and is currently working on John Dryden's Fables and editing Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella for the new Cambridge edition of the works of Jonathan Swift.

Carolyn D. Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of Pope, Homer and Manliness (1993) and numerous publications on eighteenth-century life and literature. Her broader interests include gender, medical history, and historical novels.

Thomas Woodman is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. He is the author of Poetry and Politeness in the Age of Pope (1989) and A Preface to Samuel Johnson (1993) and editor of Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth (1998).

This volume has been assembled at a difficult time of parental illness and loss. I am grateful to Blackwell, and particularly to Emma Bennett and Karen Wilson, for their patience at an inevitable delay in its production. One of the pleasures of undertaking an enterprise of this kind has been the opportunity to make close contact with so many colleagues who work in the field, both in the United Kingdom and in North America. It has enabled me to revive old friendships and initiate new ones – a model of amiable sociability of which early eighteenth-century coffee-house proprietors and patrons would thoroughly approve. I owe a debt to David Fairer for his early support for the project and his unceasing enthusiasm for eighteenth-century poetry, and to many of my Oxford colleagues, including Ros Ballaster, Abigail Williams, and Mina Gorji, for their willingness to be chivvied into contributions. I am particularly appreciative of the new insights into eighteenth-century poetry which the Oxford English MSt. Class on Politics and Poetry 1660–1750 yielded during its weekly Friday morning meetings during Michaelmas 2005. Especial thanks to John McTague, Steven Bernard, John West, Lawrence Williams, Claudine Van Hensbergen, and Ed Kenny. I am also grateful to the patient labors of Damian Love, Jenny Batt, and Gillian Somerscales, who have made this volume more accurate than it might otherwise have been. As ever, I am thankful for the daily support of the four men in my life.

The landscape of eighteenth-century poetry has changed dramatically over recent decades. In the late 1970s it was not uncommon for undergraduates to advance week by week through a course represented, typically, by Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Johnson. Many students at that time – myself included – found something antipathetic in an “Augustan” canon that seemed overwhelmingly male, metropolitan, neoclassical, and conservative. Yet already there were hints of alternative perspectives. Charles Peake's evocatively titled anthology Poetry of the Landscape and the Night (1967) offered a glimpse of a different kind of eighteenth-century poetry – meditative, melancholic, descriptive, and subjective – while Pat Rogers's Grub Street (1972) reconstructed a refreshingly vulgar and material counter-culture to correctness and couplets. Views multiplied further in the 1980s, when the New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989), the fruits of Roger Lonsdale's inexhaustible efforts to recover from oblivion forgotten poetic voices – the voices of laborers, dissenters, provincial writers, and, most importantly, women – powerfully reinforced a growing awareness of the plurality and diversity of eighteenth-century poetic culture. The second of these anthologies showed for the first time the range and variety of poetry written by women during this period: women inspired and incensed in equal measure by their male models (primarily Pope and Swift). Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (1999, 2004), which I was fortunate enough to co-edit with David Fairer, attempted to recreate, through careful juxtapositions, a contemporary sense of male and female voices in poetic dialogue. Since the early 1980s editors, biographers, and critics have made steady progress toward placing the work of such important female poets as Jane Barker, Mary Chudleigh, Anne Finch, Mary Collier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Ann Yearsley in the public domain. It is a testament to the efforts of such dedicated scholars as Carol Barash, Margaret Ezell, Kathryn King, and Isobel Grundy that university English departments now frequently, even routinely, incorporate women poets of this period within their syllabuses.

These recent acts of literary retrieval have re-emphasized the relationship between text and print culture. A sequence of distinguished studies, including Margaret Ezell's Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999) and James McLaverty's Pope, Print, and Meaning (2001), have helped make readers newly aware of the processes by which texts were produced, assembled, and disseminated, ranging from an unexpectedly tenacious côterie manuscript culture to the popular marketplace for poetry in periodicals such as Edmund Cave's Gentleman's Magazine. Brean Hammond's lively The Rise of Professional Imaginative Writing (1997) explored the complex interdependencies of “high” and “low” literary culture. The boundary between a dominant literary culture and its subculture – charted in Rogers's Grub Street – was now seen to be unstable and fluctuating. In 1972 Rogers had affirmed Pope's aesthetic superiority to the “dunces” whom his Dunciad so confidently dismissed. Recent critical work, particularly on the Whig literary tradition, has revealed how the aesthetic value judgments we have inherited from Pope and his literary associates – judgments uncannily persistent in shaping later generations' perceptions of the period – were driven as much by political as by literary bias.

Some of the liveliest and most energetic work on eighteenth-century poetry has cut across, dismantled, and re-assembled in new and thought-provoking ways the poetic texts and trends of the period. Alongside the single-author study have flourished works such as Eric Rothstein's Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1981) and Margaret Doody's The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (1982), which helped transform eighteenth-century poetry from an orderly, harmonious, and slightly dull field for humanist enquiry into a constantly surprising, sometimes unstable world in which such preoccupations as pain, pleasure, power, and metamorphosis exerted a powerful hold on the poetic imagination. David Fairer's wide-ranging English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (2003) similarly resists and counters rigid classifications, including the vexed issue of “Augustan” and “Pre-Romantic,” by evincing evidence in the first three decades of the century of an early eighteenth-century romantic mode. The plethora of recent critical studies that have enriched and complicated the traditional equation of eighteenth-century poetry with political satire by emphasizing the political inflections of other genres and modes (landscape poetry, the ode, the epic, and the lyric) have also served to loosen the bonds around the eighteenth century as a “period.” Dryden's artificially buoyant lines from the Secular Masque, written a month before his death in 1700 – “ 'Tis well the old age is past, 'tis time to begin the new” – might serve to suggest, like the ill-fated millennium celebrations of the year 2000, that any attempt to construct a period boundary along a century divide is bound to fail. As chapter 1 will show, poets of the first three decades of the new century carried with them the legacy of the post-Civil War and Restoration years in their shared preoccupation with party politics and dynastic uncertainties. The genres and forms that came to dominate verse in the middle and later century – the ode, and especially Miltonic blank verse as it evolved through Thomson's The Seasons, Young's Night Thoughts, Cowper's The Task, and eventually Wordsworth's The Prelude – derive from the generic experimentation of the Civil War period. The preoccupation with the sublime, as Shaun Irlam shows (chapter 37), stretches back into the seventeenth century and forward into the nineteenth. Poets at both ends of the century were capable of producing public poetry and political satire. As Carolyn Williams shows in chapter 35, the century began, as it would end, with an attempt to recuperate the antiquarian past – in Dryden's 1700 adaptation of “Palamon and Arcite,” a chivalric epic from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The essays in this Companion are arranged in four sections. The first offers a series of contexts – aesthetic, cultural, economic, political, and religious – for reading and understanding eighteenth-century poetry. The second section contains a sequence of close readings of individual texts, pairs of texts, or groups of texts. The choice of these has been determined in part by their ready availability to readers of Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, to which this Companion is designed to be what its title proclaims. But the texts in “Readings” go far beyond those included in the Anthology, encouraging readers to range more widely. The third section pays attention to a number of different genres and modes that recur through the eighteenth century. The final section, “Themes and Debates,” picks up a number of strands of argument and investigation that run through current critical work on eighteenth-century poetry, such as Whig and Tory poetics, the role of the sublime, the self-taught tradition, the constructions of femininity, and the uses of the past.