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

Abstract

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.

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