IT IS SOMETIMES insinuated that author-publisher relations changed once and for all as a consequence of Dryden’s contract with Jacob Tonson to publish a subscription edition of his translation of Virgil, and Pope’s subsequent agreement with Bernard Lintot to publish a translation of the Iliad. Both poets unquestionably made a lot of money out of these publications. Dryden should have received the proceeds of the 101 five-guinea subscriptions in their entirety, in accordance with his contract with Tonson, as well as an additional sum from the cheaper second subscription. In addition to agreeing to pay Dryden £200 in four instalments for the copyright of his translation of Virgil to encourage him to complete the project as speedily as possible, Tonson also paid the capital costs of the plates and alterations and the costs of the 101 copies for the first subscribers. He even made a contribution towards the costs of the copies of the second subscribers. John Barnard calculates that “in all Dryden received between £910 and £1,075 from Tonson and the subscribers, and probably £400 or £500 for his [three] dedications” (“Patrons” 177). Yet Dryden fell out with Tonson, and William Congreve and one Mr Aston were called in to mediate. “You always intended I shou[l]d get nothing by the Second Subscriptions,” Dryden complained to Tonson, “as I found from first to last” (Letters 77). After shopping around among other booksellers, however, Dryden came to think rather differently. “Upon trial,” Dryden wrote to Tonson, “I find all of your trade are Sharpers & you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you” (Letters 80-81).

As this does not seem to me to be overwhelmingly indicative of a new-found confidence in the relationship between author and bookseller, perhaps we should exercise caution before rushing to use the example of Dryden’s contract with Tonson as evidence of the rise of the professional writer. On the contrary, an examination of the arrangements surrounding Dryden’s translation of Virgil suggests that they were actually a sort of adaptation of the system of “literary production based on patronage”, which, according to Jürgen Habermas, was superseded “in the first decades of the eighteenth century, after the publisher replaced the patron as the author’s commissioner and organized the commercial distribution of literary works” (38). “Publication by subscription was not a new idea, and both Dryden and Tonson had experience with it,” James Winn points out: “For the Virgil project, Dryden and Tonson correctly anticipated persuading one hundred aristocrats to pay the substantial sum of five guineas for an expensive edition on fine paper, adorned with engravings, by promising that each subscriber would have one of the engravings dedicated to him, with his name and coat of arms. They also expected to sell several hundred copies of the same edition at two guineas to subscribers who would simply have their names listed” (Winn 474-75). The attraction of this method of publication as far as Tonson was concerned was that he would not have had to underwrite the costs in terms of paper, printing, marketing and distribution of such a huge financial undertaking. By publishing “by subscription,” Dryden, on the other hand, could look forward to receiving “half in hande” from the subscribers for the five-guinea edition—and 250 guineas was not to be sneezed at—“besides another inferior Subscription of two Guinneys” (Letters 64). This was one of the principal attractions of subscription publishing for authors. They could be paid a considerable proportion of the amount of the edition in advance, and in fact Dryden was paid three guineas down by the five-guinea subscribers, and two more on receipt of the book.

If on first blush this arrangement appears to anticipate the advance on signature of more modern contracts between author and publisher, in other key respects it seems to be more of an adaptation of the older system of patronage which, according to Habermas, had been superseded “after the publisher replaced the patron as the author’s commissioner.” As Thomas Lockwood has perceptively observed, subscription publishing was actually “an intensely nostalgic replication of personal patronage within a publishing system long since operating on market motives—a commercialization of patronage, or even a democratization of it, but in the sense only of a commercially expanded opportunity for lots of people to play cheaply at being patrons as of old” (32). This certainly seems to have been the case as far as Dryden’s translation of Virgil is concerned. Winn notes that “the final list of 101 five-guinea subscribers is by no means restricted to people sharing his beliefs” (475). Headed up by Princess Anne and her husband, Prince George of Denmark, it comprised a representative cross-section of the nobility and gentry of England. Perhaps of even more significance, the long list of two-guinea subscribers “includes military officers, postmasters, architects, doctors, clergymen, and cabinet ministers” (Winn 475). In sum, Dryden’s translation of Virgil offers strong supporting evidence for Professor Lockwood’s suggestion that subscription publishing allowed “lots of people to play cheaply at being patrons” (32).

It was not plain sailing, however. Dryden had anticipated making a considerable additional amount from the two-guinea subscribers. Before he fell out with Tonson over what he felt to be sharp dealing on the bookseller’s part, he wrote to him to explain that, “if the Second Subscriptions rise, I will take so much the more time [over the rest of the translation], because the profit will incourage me the more” (Letters 75). Doubtless it was because he was so disappointed that Dryden subsequently accused Tonson of intending that he should “get nothing by the Second Subscriptions” (Letters 77), and it probably also had a bearing on his decision “to make three severall Dedications, of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Eneis” (Letters 86). In any discussion of changes in author-publisher relations after the Revolution of 1688, it is important not to overlook the several ways in which writers could make money from their works, because selling the “copies” or copyrights to booksellers was not necessarily the most lucrative method, particularly after the expiry of the Printing Act in 1695. Almost certainly Dryden sought to compensate for the failure of the two-guinea subscriptions to live up to his expectations by exploiting the old-fashioned means of dedicating his translations to three separate patrons in hopes of financial reward.

He had good reason to be optimistic about the prospect of benefiting in this way. In 1692 he had been generously rewarded by the Earl of Abingdon for his poem, Eleonora, written in memory of the Countess who had died the previous year. One tradition claims that Dryden was given 500 guineas, although Winn is surely right to believe that figure to be “wildly exaggerated” (474). My point is that even Dryden, the best-selling writer of the age, would have been unable to make anything like that sort of money had he sold the copyright of any of his works to a bookseller in the 1690s. He would have been acutely aware that this was the case as he had sold the copyright of his play, Cleomenes, to Tonson for the large sum of 30 guineas the previous year; hence the attraction of a subscription edition. Although he was urged by Tonson to dedicate his translation of Virgil to William III, Dryden’s decision to “make three severall Dedications” was dictated partly by the exigency of the publishing schedule—which meant that as the work was “already in the Press,” he could no longer delay publication “in hopes of” the “return” of James II (Letters 86)—and partly by the desire to maximize his profits. “Whichever sum, £1,075 or £910 6s. 8d., is accepted as being the closer to Dryden’s earnings, it is clear that the larger part of the total profits for the Virgil was dependent upon copy money and subscriptions,” Professor Barnard has argued: “At the very outside Dryden received perhaps one third of his gains from patrons, and the greater part of that was probably in the form of payment for the three dedications” (“Subscriptions” 140). It is for this reason, presumably, that Professor Barnard suggests that “the Virgil would seem to represent a transitional phase in the changeover from patron to bookseller” (“Subscriptions” 130). 1

The same might reasonably be argued about Pope’s contract with Bernard Lintot for his translation of Homer’s Iliad. Although he had publicized the venture as early as 1713, the only extant version of the proposals is to be found at the end of the third edition of The Rape of the Lock (1714) under the heading, “BOOKS printed for Bernard Lintott”:

PRoposals for printing, by Subscription, a Translation of Homer’s Iliad into Verse and Rhime. By Mr. Pope. To which will be added, explanatory and critical Notes; wherein the most curious and useful Observations, either of the Ancients or Moderns, in relation to this Author in general, or to any Passages in particular, shall be collected and placed under their proper Heads.
This Work shall be printed in six Volumes in Quarto, on the finest Paper, and on a letter new Cast on purpose; with Ornaments and initial Letters engraven on Copper. Each Volume containing four Books of the Iliad; with Notes to each Book.
It is proposed at the rate of one Guinea for each Volume: The first Volume to be deliver’d in Quires within the space of a Year from the Date of this Proposal, and the rest in like manner annually: Only the Subscribers are to pay two Guineas in hand, advancing one in regard of the Expence the Undertaker must be at in collecting the several Editions, Criticks and Commentators, which are very numerous upon this Author.
A third Guinea to be given upon delivery of the second Volume; and so on to the sixth, for which nothing will be required, on consideration of the Guinea advanced at first. Subscriptions are taken in by Bernard Lintott. (Pope 53)

What I find particularly interesting about this novel arrangement, over and above Pope’s control of paper quality, letterpress, ornaments and engravings, was how subscribers were to pay the six guineas for the six-volume set. As David Foxon points out: “Publishing in six volumes on the instalment system also meant that subscribers could be asked for more money because it was spread over six years” (Pope 51). Whereas the initial outlay for the subscribers to Dryden’s Virgil was three guineas, Pope’s subscribers were only asked to “pay two Guineas in hand:” one for the first volume itself; and one in advance “in regard of the Expence the Undertaker must be at.” The rest of the six guineas was to be paid in installments as the volumes came out year by year and were delivered to the subscribers. As Pope’s contract with Lintot stipulated that the latter would print 750 copies of each volume of his translation of the Iliad “on a Royall Paper of a Quarto size,” he could anticipate total receipts from 750 subscribers of 4,500 guineas, of which 1,500 guineas would be paid up front, as opposed to the 500 guineas in total that Dryden received from his one hundred five-guinea subscribers. In addition, Lintot was to pay Pope 200 guineas per volume for the copyright, as opposed to the £200 in four installments that Dryden received from Tonson. When he signed the contract with Lintot, therefore, Pope might have expected to receive a total of 5,700 guineas for his translation of the Iliad—around £6,000 2—at least four times as much as Dryden made out of his Virgil, assuming Professor Barnard’s estimate of between £1,310 and £1,575 is accurate.

As in the case of Dryden’s Virgil, Pope found that publishing by subscription proved to be far from straightforward, however. The list of Dryden’s first subscribers was filled so speedily that he actually complained to Tonson that “I cou’d have got an hundred pounds more: and you might have spard almost all your trouble, if you had thought fit to publish the proposals for the first Subscriptions: for I have guinneas offerd me every day, if there had been room” (Letters 80-81). 3 Pope’s experience was rather different, as he had to work much harder than he had anticipated in order to attract his 654 subscribers. And although he had been sufficiently canny in negotiating his contract with Lintot to ensure that, as Pat Rogers has pointed out, “he took all the subscription money, without the deductions for printing, paper, distribution etc. which normally came off the author’s share” (30), this arrangement had a corresponding disadvantage. “Lintot had no particular interest in assembling a large corps,” Professor Rogers points out, “since he was to make his profits out of the separate trade edition” (8). Hence the burden of getting subscriptions fell on Pope’s own shoulders. “I have been a long time very much taken up [sic] ingaged in all those Inconveniences which one must necessarily, more or less, endure from the world, whenever one expects to be serv’d in it,” he explained to Sir William Trumbull on 26 February 1714: “This Subscription having forced me upon many Appointments, Visits, & Tavern-Conversations, which as little agree with my Nature & Inclination, as with my Constitution” (Sherburn 402).

One final important point needs to be made about the experiences of Dryden and Pope in translating Virgil and the Iliad, respectively: they were by no means typical of the considerable number of ventures by authors who wished to make money out of publishing by subscription. Dryden was indisputably the foremost writer of his day, appreciated across the political spectrum regardless of his personal opinions, and yet he was in serious financial difficulties throughout the 1690s until his death in 1700. It is against this background that his unhappiness with what he suspected had been sharp practice on Tonson’s part with regard to the second subscriptions must be viewed. In Pope’s case, it was Lintot who seriously overestimated the profits to be made from a trade edition of a translation of the Iliad by “a distinguished writer at the height of his fame.” “Subscription ventures went on unabated, but few—if any—authors could demand Pope’s terms,” Professor Rogers observes: “The whole episode was less typical than historians of literature and of the book trade have chosen to believe” (29-30). Pope’s contract for his translation of the Iliad may have been “one of the most lucrative in literary history” (McLaverty 206), but, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed in “An Epistle from Pope to Lord Bolingbroke,” Pope “Outwitted Lintot in his very trade” (qtd. in Foxon, Pope 63].

By way of illustrating the difficulties facing those who sought to make money by subscription editions of large works at the turn of the eighteenth century, perhaps we need look no further than the very different experience of Daniel Defoe. The Review for September 26, 1704 carried the following advertisement:

To be Printed by Subscription;
JURE DIVINO: A Satyr against Tyrranny and Passive Obedience; in Twelve Books. By the Author of the True born Englishman.
The whole will be near 100 Sheets in Folio, with Large Annotations, Printed on the finest Paper; No more to be Printed than are Subscribed. The Price to be Ten Shillings, Half a Crown only to be paid Down, the Remainder on Delivery: Subscriptions are taken in at the following Places … (1:251)

Quite clearly, Defoe’s project was of a different order from Dryden’s translation of Virgil or Pope’s translation of the Iliad. Instead of two or three guineas in advance of publication, Defoe asked for a mere two shillings and sixpence. Moreover, it is apparent from the Preface that Defoe did not anticipate he would be offered a huge sum of “copy money” by booksellers eager to purchase the copyright of Jure Divino. “Subscriptions are in their Nature design’d for two ends,” he explained:

     First, To enable the Authors by the Money advanc’d, to go thro’ the Expence of Printing, which every Man, that undertakes to publish a Book on his own Risque, cannot do, now which these Gentlemen did not know I could do without them.
Secondly, To secure the Author that the Subscribers will take it when ’tis finished … (Jure Divino 1:xxvii)

Unfortunately, Defoe was thwarted in both of these ends. By January 1706 he was reduced to complaining in the Review that “of the Subscriptions taken in London, tho’ Advertisements were frequently Publish’d, not half of them have paid the Money to the Author, nor can be prevail’d on, to let him know how many hands they have; by which he is kept from knowing his Number, tho’ they must know, he having promis’d to Print no more than are Subscrib’d, he could not go on without it” (3:12). Evidently rumors had been circulating that Defoe had no intention of printing Jure Divino, “and only form’d the Subscription as a Cheat, to get the Money in hand”—a “hard Suggestion,” which he sought to rebut as “Absurd in it self False, and without Ground, and meerly Malicious” (3:11).

Worse was to follow. The subscription edition of Jure Divino was finally advertised in the Review for July 18, 1706:

Saturday next will be publish’d,
JURE DIVINO, a Satyr in twelve Books, Folio. Written by the True-Born-English-Man, is now printed and ready to be delivered to the Subscribers, either bound or in Quires—For the Convenience of the Gentleman, who have subscrib’d, or are willing to have the said Book; Numbers are left at the following Places. (3:344)

But Defoe had delayed publication so long that he had been beaten to it. Two days later the Review carried the following long notice:

ADVERTISEMENTS.
There being Notice given in Print, of a base and villainous Design of Printing in small Character and less Volume, a Book Entitled Jure Divino, written by the Author of this Paper.
The Author setting aside the Arguments against the Honesty of the thing, as what is no way moving to those, who commit so manifest a Robbery on the Property of another, desires the World but to consider the Justice of the Pretence, Viz. That this Book is sold for the sole Benefit of the Author.
The Author thanks the Pyrater of this Book for taking off the Mask, and showing the Thief so plain, that any Man may see it himself without a Comment.
If not for the Benefit of the Author, why did the Author propose it by Subscription?—Why did he not rather, having labour’d to finish a Tract of that Size, come humbly to the Bookseller, and beg him to receive the Benefit of his Work?
I think, therefore, that there can be no stronger Argument than this; That this Design is a Robbery on the Author, by a Sort of Men, who will neither give Authors valuable Considerations for any thing they do, nor suffer them to publish it themselves.
I can therefore no more question, but those Gentlemen, who have had so much Respect to the Author, as to encourage him to print the Book on their Subscription, will be mov’d by such foul Practises, to stand the firmer by their Subscription, which now becomes a Justice to the Author.
As to the Pretence of imposing on the Subscribers, ’tis a manifest Forgery; a Print having with great Charge been prepar’d to go with the Book, it has been offer’d to such as pleas’d voluntarily to pay for it, but never impos’d upon any; for the truth where-of, the Author appeals to the Gentlemen themselves.
As to the spurious Edition, its Corruptions, Errors and false Representations, accompanying such a Work, more shall be said hereafter, and a Proposal made to the Subscribers of this Book, that shall effectually suppress so scandalous an Attempt; and whenever the Author thinks fit to print it in 8vo. with Additions, the Subscribers to this shall be made Amends for those Additions, and the Price be much lower than 5 s.
As to those Gentlemen who have subscrib’d, the Author refers them to the Book for the Performance, whether the Terms on his side are not comply’d with, even beyond his Proposals; assuring them, he could have sav’d 40l. in number of Sheets, Goodness of Paper and Workmanship, and yet have come within the Bounds of his Proposal. If after this, any of the Subscribers, to save a Trifle, shall take up with a spurious Copy, to the encouraging a Thief in the robbing the Author, and thereby become accessory to the Crime—I submit to their Honesty, and had rather recieve [sic] Wrong than do it. (3:347-48)

On August 3rd, the Review concluded a mock advertisement for the pirated edition with the wry proposal that: “Whoever has a Mind to encourage such Robbery of other Men’s Studies at their own Expence, may be furnished with the said Book at Mr. Benjamin Bragg’s, Publisher in ordinary to the Pyrates. As appears by setting his Name to their Advertisements” (3:372). Whereas Dryden and Pope made small fortunes by publishing by subscription, Defoe’s very different attempt proved to be an unmitigated failure. “Defoe later claimed that he had lost £1,500 because of the pirated editions,” Paula Backscheider observes: “His dreams of establishing himself as a major poet could never be realized” (193).

II

Dryden’s translation of Virgil was finally delivered to subscribers, unbound, in August 1697. Two years earlier, the parliamentary session ended before the renewal of the Printing or Licensing Act, and subsequent attempts to introduce a bill for “the better Regulating of Printing, and Printing-Presses” in the succeeding session came to nothing. What has not been sufficiently taken into consideration in accounts of the alleged transformation in author-publisher relations on the expiry of the Printing or Licensing Act is the likely effect on the purchasing by booksellers of the “copies” or copyrights of poems, especially longer poems. The “consequential chaos in the book trade” (Astbury 322) seems to have had a serious impact on the amount of income which might otherwise have been derived from publishing poetry, as Defoe graphically explained in relation to The True-Born Englishman. Estimating that he would have “gain’d above … 1000 l. … had he been [able] to enjoy the Profit of his own Labour,” Defoe pointed out that he had been badly disadvantaged as a consequence of pirated editions of his best-selling poem, which was:

a Book that besides Nine Editions of the Author, has been Twelve Times printed by other Hands; some of which have been sold for 1 d. others 2 d. and others 6 d. the Author’s Edition being fairly printed, and on good Paper, and could not be sold under a Shilling. 80000 of the Small Ones have been sold in the Streets for 2 d. or at a Penny: And the Author thus abused and discourag’d had no Remedy but Patience. 4

Although Foxon succeeded in identifying only five authorized and five pirate editions rather than the “Nine Editions of the Author” and twelve pirate editions which Defoe asserted had been published in the Preface to the 1705 edition of A True Collection of the Writings of the Author of the True Born English-man (Foxon, English Verse 1:173), it is clear that the pirates benefited at Defoe’s expense. One of the cheaper pirated editions (ESTC T070653) took pleasure in announcing in Black Letter on its truncated title-page: “Note, This is Printed Word for Word from the Shilling Book.”

As the title-page of this pirated edition of The True-Born Englishman suggests, separately published poems usually cost either a shilling or sixpence, depending on length and format. 5
Individual plays and lengthy political pamphlets also normally cost a shilling—although some, such as Swift’s Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions, published in the autumn of 1701, cost a whopping four shillings. This leads on to an important consideration which tends to be overlooked. While Defoe inveighed against “this Piratical Printer, as such are very rightly called, who unjustly Print other Mens Copies,” 6
it is imperative not to underestimate the possible effects of the “legal hiatus” between 1695 and April 10, 1710 when the provisions of the Copyright Act of 1709 came into force. As William St Clair explains: “In the absence of a law of licensing or of intellectual property, the two main agents of literary production, publishers and authors, were both in danger of being unable to recoup their investments” (89). One of the unforeseen consequences of the expiry of the Printing Act was that the privileges of the Stationers’ Company perished along with the licensing system. More importantly, the Stationers’ Company had hitherto functioned as the mechanism by which the state sought to regulate and control illicit printing. As booksellers no longer had the ability to impose sanctions on those who infringed their copyright, they were highly unlikely to pay the “great Sums of Money for Copies” which they claimed had been their practice prior to the expiry of the Printing Act. As The Case of the Booksellers Right to their Copies, or Sole Power of Printing their Respective Books, represented to Parliament argued: “The Expense preparatory to the Printing of a Book, that is to say, the Setting the Letters together is such, that nothing less than the Printing off and selling Five hundred, and in many case a Thousand, will refund it.” Given these conditions, it was imperative that the trade was protected against “the Invasion of Interlopers” who by printing “Counterfeit Copies”—as Defoe found to his cost—jeopardised the income of both bookseller and author. As The Case of the Booksellers Right to their Copies proceeded to explain, “the greatest Charge in Printing is setting the Letters together; If he [the bookseller] be secure that no body else can print the Book, he will venture to print off a much larger Number than with the danger of that Book being Printed by another he durst do.” 7

After 1695, it appears, poets could no longer look forward with confidence to making money out of selling the copyrights of their poems to eager booksellers. This complicates any straightforward account of the rise of the professional writer following on from the end of pre-printing censorship. Interestingly, as J. Paul Hunter points out, “the late seventeenth century, especially after the expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695, elevated the miscellany to new levels of frequency, popularity and sophistication” (169). Not long before the Act was allowed to lapse, Jacob Tonson published Examen Poeticum: Being the Third Part of Miscellany Poems, Containing Variety of New Translations of the Ancient Poets. Together with many Original Copies, by the Most Eminent Hands which is dedicated by Dryden “To the Right Honourable, my Lord Radcliffe.” The section which followed, entitled “From the Bookseller to the Reader” and signed “JACOB TONSON,” is of such interest to the publication of poetry in the period that it merits quoting at length:

Having formerly Printed two Parts of Miscellany Poems, they were so kindly receiv’d, that I had long before now Endeavour’d to obtain a Third, had I not almost ever since the Publishing of the Second been Solliciting the Translating of Juvenal, and Persius. Soon after the Publication of that Book I waited upon several Gentlemen to ask their Opinion of a Third Miscellany, who encourag’d me to endeavour it, and have considerably help’d me in it.
Many very Ingenious Copies were sent to me upon my giving publick notice of this Design; but had I printed ’em all, the book wou’d have swell’d to too great a bulk, and I must have delay’d the Publishing of it ’till next Term: But those omitted, shall upon Order from the Authors be restored; or if the Gentlemen will be pleas’d to stay ’till next year, I shall take it as a favour to insert them into another Miscellany, which I then intend, if I find by the Sale that this proves as Entertaining as the former.
Several Reasons encourage me to Proceed upon the endeavouring a Fourth Volume: As that I had assurance of several Copies from Persons now out of England; which, though not yet arriv’d, I am confident will be sent in a short time, and they come from such Hands, that I can have no reason to doubt of their being very much esteem’d.
I would likewise willingly try if there could be an Annual Miscellany, which I believe might be an useful Diversion to the Ingenious. By this means care would be taken to preserve ev’ry Choice Copy that appears; whereas I have known several Celebrated Pieces so utterly lost in three or four years time after they were written, as not to be recoverable by all the search I could make after ’em.
I was for some years together possest of several Poems of Sir Carr Scrope’s, written with his own Hand, which I in vain of late strove to recover; for as I forgot to whom I lent ’em, so I believe the Person to whom they were lent does not remember where they were borrowed; But if the present Possessour of them reads this, I beg their being return’d.
If I should go on with the Design of an Annual Miscellany, after I have procur’d some Stock to proceed upon, I will give Publick Notice of it. And I hope the Gentleman who approve of this Design, will promote it, by sending such Copies as they judge will be acceptable.
                                                                                                                                                                   Your very humble Servant
                                                                                                                                                                                           JACOB TONSON

As the publication in the following year of The Annual Miscellany: For The Year 1694: Being the Fourth Part of Miscellany Poems strongly suggests, Tonson seems to have been perfectly serious when he put forward his proposal for “an Annual Miscellany,” even if he did not succeed in his “Design” of publishing one year on year. Whether this was because he found it an unprofitable enterprise or was unable to procure sufficient “Stock” of “Copies” to maintain an annual publication, the content of Tonson’s notice in Examen Poeticum is of significance to our understanding of the production and circulation of poetry at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Tonson does not appear to have been exaggerating when he stated that he received a large number of “very Ingenious Copies” on giving “publick notice” in Motteux’s The Gentleman’s Journal for June 1693 of his intention to publish “a third Volume of Miscellany Poems, written by Mr. Dryden and other eminent Hands.” 8
As Charles E. Ward notes: “The response seems to have been immediate; for in July Motteux announced, prematurely as it would appear, that Examen Poeticum had been published” (Letters 166). This did not please Dryden, who complained to William Walsh in August 1693 that “Tonson has … fayld me in the publishing his Miscellanyes” (Letters 56). Whether Dryden felt he had been let down because of delayed payment for his contribution to the so-called “Third Part of Miscellany Poems,” or because he went unrewarded for his lengthy dedication, “To the Right Honourable, My Lord Radcliffe,” is uncertain:

            My Lord,

THese Miscellany Poems, are by many Titles yours. The first they claim from your acceptance of my Promise to present them to you; before some of them were yet in being. The rest are deriv’d from your own Merit, the exactness of your Judgment in Poetry, and the candour of your Nature; easie to forgive some trivial faults, when they come accompanied, with countervailing Beauties. But after all, though these are your equitable claims to a Dedication from other Poets, yet I must acknowledge a Bribe in the case, which is your particular liking of my Verses. (Dryden, Examen Poeticum sig. A3)

The “bribe” Dryden was actually looking for was a financial return for his sycophantic dedication, but this failed to materialise. “I am sure you thought My Lord Radclyffe would have done something,” he wrote to Tonson on August 30th: “I ghessd more truly, though he cou’d not; but I was too farr ingagd to desist; though I was tempted to it, by the melancholique prospect I had of it” (Letters 58). Given the context, Dryden is almost certainly referring to his hopes of a reward for his lengthy disquisition attacking Rymer’s denigration of modern drama which, on account of its political overtones, Winn describes as “the least cautious piece of prose he had published since the Revolution” (463).

The big question with regard to the “[m]any very Ingenious Copies” Tonson apparently received from “Gentlemen” was the basis on which they were submitted. Would we be right to assume that these contributors expected to be paid for the privilege of seeing their poems in print? After all, at this juncture booksellers routinely referred not to “copyrights” but to “copies.” It was one of their great grievances that the “great Sums of Money for Copies” which they had paid prior to the expiry of the Printing Act on the understanding that it gave them “the sole Power of Printing that Book for ever after” had effectively been rendered virtually worthless by the dismantling of the regulatory machinery of the Stationers’ Company. But Tonson was writing prior to the failure to renew the provisions of the Printing Act. When he published not only Examen Poeticum but also The Annual Miscellany: For The Year 1694 he had no reason to suppose that the licensing system was about to come to an abrupt end.

Before we jump to the conclusion that Tonson paid not only Dryden, but all the other contributors to his miscellanies, we should take into account the financial implications of his so doing, because they are likely to have been prohibitive. There were over twenty named contributors to Examen Poeticum in addition to Dryden himself, several of whom, including Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell, were appearing in print for the first time. Had Tonson paid all his living contributors for the “very Ingenious Copies” he solicited, then he would have had to sell a huge number of copies of his miscellany simply in order to break even. On the contrary, Tonson represented his project to publish “an Annual Miscellany” as a public-spirited gesture “to preserve ev’ry Choice Copy that appears” lest any “Celebrated Pieces” were to be lost to posterity. Thus it is hard to escape the conclusion that when, after seeking public approbation of his “Design,” he ends by hoping that those “Gentleman who approve of this Design, will promote it, by sending such Copies as they judge will be acceptable,” Tonson is anticipating that they will submit their work without any thought of financial reward.

III
Almost certainly, this was how those celebrated early examples of literary periodicals, The Athenian Mercury and The Gentleman’s Journal: or the monthly Miscellany operated. While the former sought to resolve “all the most Nice and Curious Questions. PROPOSED BY THE INGENIOUS Of Either SEX,” the latter carried an advertisement in each monthly number desiring the “Ingenious” “to send such Pieces in Verse or Prose as may properly be inserted in this Miscellany, directing them to be left at either of the Places mention’d in the Title, or at the Black-Boy Coffee-house in Ave-Maria Lane, for the Author of the Gentleman’s Journal; not forgetting to discharge Postage.” Patently, the “authors” of these periodicals attempted to solve the problem of providing copy for each issue simply by soliciting it from their readers. Pierre Motteux, the editor of the Gentleman’s Journal, even puffed the merits of a miscellany over other forms of publication:

We must indeed confess that the goodness of a Book many times causes it to be thrown by, and that serious and learned Tracts often lye heavy on the hands of the disappointed Bookseller, while gay Trifles have a happier Fate. The best way is to weave the pleasing with the profitable, and that can never be done better than in a Miscellany, wherein different Matters, like various Colours, set off each other, and by frequents Transitions we wander agreeably from one subject to another. (2:231)

On December 1, 1691, Dunton published the following question, which was one of the earliest acknowledged by the editors to have been submitted to The Athenian Mercury by a woman:

Whether Songs on Moral, Religious or Divine Subjects, composed by Persons of Wit and Virtue, and set to both grave and pleasant Tunes, wou’d not the Charms of Poetry, and sweetness of Musick, make good impressions of Modesty and Sobriety on the Young and Noble, make them really in Love with Virtue and Goodness, and prepare their minds for the design’d Reformation [of manners]

The question proved of less significance than the specific literary query tagged on at the end: “And what are your Thoughts on the late Pastoral Poem, &c.” The querist, Elizabeth Singer, was actually puffing a poem of her own, subsequently published by Dunton in 1696 in her Poems on Several Occasions under the title, “Upon King William’s passing the Boyn, &c.” But for some reason, observing that “this Querist seems not only to be Poetically enclin’d, but to desire our Thoughts on the late Pastoral Poem, we shall here add Two or Three Lines to the Author of it.” Why Dunton or Samuel Wesley, the Athenians’ literary expert, chose to describe the poem in this way, particularly as it had not been published in the Athenian Mercury, is a question which recent commentators on Singer’s championing by the Athenians have not thought to address. Dunton’s championing of Singer as the “Pindarick Lady” has been presented as evidence of a new sensibility as far as women’s writing is concerned, and it is undoubtedly true that she was praised in extraordinarily effusive terms:

All the Poems written by the Ingenious Pindarick Lady, having a peculiar Delicacy of Stile, and Majesty of Verse, as does sufficiently distinguish ’em from all others; and having much gratified many of our Querists, by inserting in our Oracles those Poems she lately sent us, we are willing to oblige them once more with the following Pindarick Poem, which we have here Printed Word for Word, as we receiv’d it from her. (The Athenian Oracle, 3:523)

But one of the reasons which occurs to me is that Dunton, like Tonson and Motteux, was hoping to make money out of a poet’s efforts by publishing her work without paying her for the copyright. In 1696 Singer’s Poems On Several Occasions. Written By Philomela was published, “Printed for John Dunton at the Raven in Jewen-street.” Whether Dunton bought the copyright of Singer’s Poems remains a question. While the biographical “Preface to the Reader,” signed Elizabeth Johnson, is effusive in its recommendation of “that vivacity of Thought, that purity of Language, that softness and delicacy in the Love-part, that strength and Majesty of Numbers almost every where, especially on Heroic Subjects, and that clear and unaffected Love to Virtue; that heighth of Piety and warmth of Devotion in the Canticles, and other Religious Pieces,” it offers no information about the contractual arrangements leading to the publication of the “young Lady … whose NAME had been prefix’d, had not her own Modesty absolutely forbidden it.” That it should not do so is not itself unusual, but the fact that the young female poet allegedly sought to conceal her identity from the reader perhaps indicates that she was more concerned with seeing her poems in print than in making money.

Supporting evidence that this was indeed the case comes from Edmund Curll’s “Second Edition” of Singer’s Poems On Several Occasions. According to Curll’s preface, the poems in Philomela: Or, Poems by Mrs. Elizabeth Singer, [Now Rowe,] Of Frome in Somersetshire (1736, but dated 1737 on the title-page) were “faithfully Re-printed from the Copy published in 1696, except a little Reformation in the Numbers of some of them, and the Addition of a few later Compositions substituted in the Room of others, which the Writer’s Friends were desirous of having omitted” (Rowe, Philomela xvii). But this was not Curll’s only attempt to establish his right to publish the poems. He included a letter:

TO
Mr. R * * * * *
Frome, 30 Aug. 1736
                          SIR,
I AM infinitely obliged to you for your Concern for my Character. Assure Mr. CURLL, that, in Printing my POEMS, no Body will dispute his Right, or give him any Opposition. I only desire him to own, that it’s his Partiality for my Writings, not my Vanity, which has occasioned the Re-publishing of them …

I am, Sir,
                                                                                                                                                                                                  Yours, &c.
ELIZ. ROWE.

There is no way of knowing for certain whether this is genuine, but quite clearly Curll was seeking to establish his right to publish Rowe’s works. More importantly, the wording attributed to Rowe in the letter—“in Printing my POEMS, no Body will dispute his Right, or give him any Opposition”—is perhaps significant, suggesting that she had not sold the copyright of her poems to Dunton.

CONCLUSION

Dustin Griffin begins his new book, Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century by observing that “Samuel Johnson declared with some ironic amusement in 1753” that the eighteenth century “could rightly be called ‘The Age of Authors,’ as never before had so many authors found their way into print” (1). 9 While scholars have concentrated on the “great Sums of Money” which authors, particularly after the provisions of the Copyright Act came into force on April 10, 1710, are supposed to have been paid for selling the copyrights of their works to booksellers, little interest has hitherto been shown in the other ways in which writings could find their way into print. I have recently drawn attention to the continuing practice of authors, including poets, paying for their works to be printed. In The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, William St Clair notes that, as late as the turn of the nineteenth century, many aspiring poets, including Byron, Keats and Shelley, either paid for their poems to be printed or published them “on commission” (586, 611, 649). This almost certainly was the case around 1700 when the title-pages of most of the pamphlets now attributed to Defoe, including those in verse, carried the names of neither printer nor bookseller, but simply stated that they were “Printed in the Year X”—a practice which, as Foxon pointed out forty years ago in his Lyell lectures, indicates that the work was distributed by “what the eighteenth century called ‘a publisher,’” i.e. “one who distributes books and pamphlets without having any other responsibility—he does not own the copyright or employ a printer, or even know the author” (Pope 2). Even though they are rarely discussed, considerations such as these surely have a bearing on the increasingly debated question of “the rise of the professional author” in the eighteenth century. 10 It is with this in mind that I raise the further issue of whether poets were paid for their contributions to miscellanies and periodicals at the turn of the eighteenth century, or whether, as seems to me much more likely, those who submitted “ingenious Copies” to booksellers like Tonson tacitly gave permission for their poems to be published without payment. And if this does indeed prove to be the case, perhaps we would be wise to exercise a little caution before assuming that, notwithstanding the examples of Dryden and Pope, authors made “great Sums of Money” from writing poetry at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Goldsmiths, University of London

WHILE the attempts of many writers to secure patronage have led to setbacks over the centuries, it was the unfortunate fate of Samuel Pordage in 1673 to receive the equivalent of a giant blown raspberry. Seeking support for his heroic tragedy, Herod and Mariamne, Pordage decided to try to find it from that erratic source, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester. Not known to Rochester personally, Pordage left him a copy and waited:

At the expiration of about a week he went a second time to my Lord’s house,
where he found the manuscript in the hands of the porter, with this distich
writ upon the cover of it:

Poet, whoe’er thou art, God damn thee,

Go hang thyself, and burn thy Mariamne.
(qtd. in Boyle 2.951–52)

In another version of the anecdote, a more metrically correct variant of the couplet softens Rochester’s scorn slightly,1 but still urges Pordage to get rid of his wretched tragedy.

The initial publication of this story in 1723 was in the History of Herod and Mariamne; Collected and Compil’d from the Best Historians, and Serving to Illustrate the Fable of Mr. Fenton’s Tragedy. Mariamne, Elijah Fenton’s version of the tragic story of the fall of Herod’s second wife, was apparently more successful than Pordage’s, as it evidently warranted a volume of contextual and explanatory writings. The writer of the history quotes the Rochester story as evidence to conclude that “we have Reason to suspect that this [i.e., Pordage’s version] was of no great Reputation” (History A4). Yet the same year also furnished an appearance for Pordage in Giles Jacob’s Poetical Register: “This Play was writ many Years before it could be brought on the Stage, but when it appear’d, it was well receiv’d” (1.204, drawing on Langbaine 406).

How can these conflicting accounts of Pordage’s play be reconciled? One endorses Rochester’s view by quoting his contempt; the other claims that the reception of Pordage’s work was favorable. Such a combination of approval and contempt dogs the career of Pordage (c.1633–c.1691). The son of John Pordage (1607–1681), a follower of Jacob Boehme, Pordage is most widely known as one of Dryden’s poetic enemies during the Exclusion Crisis, and his Azaria and Hushai (1682) is respected as one of the best of the ripostes to Absalom and Achitophel (1681). Pordage’s description of Dryden as Shimei pays the more famous poet back in his own coin:

Shimei the Poet Laureate of that Age,

The falling Glory of the Jewish Stage,

Who scourg’d the Priest, and ridicul’d the Plot,

Like common men must not be quite forgot.

(Azaria and Hushai 29)

There was more in the same vein in the self-explanatory The Medal Revers’d (1682); Pordage’s reward was to appear the same year in the Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel, as “lame Mephibosheth the Wisard’s Son,” one of those “Poor Slaves in metre, dull and adle-pated” who have attacked Dryden (2.74). The insulting remarks were part and parcel of such conflicts. In “Spencer’s Ghost,” John Oldham refers to writers who “Have grown contemptible and slighted since, / As Pordidg, Fleckno, or the British Prince” (241). Apart from Richard Flecknoe, immortalized by Dryden, The British Princes (1669) was a poem by the Honourable Edward Howard (1624–c.1700); Howard features in the Dunciad, and his poetry was also the subject of squibs by Dorset, Butler, and Rochester (see Dunciad 136–37). Edward Thompson, Oldham’s eighteenth-century editor, described Pordage as one of “two wretched Dramatick writers” when glossing the passage (Compositions 3.45). Pordage is thus placed amongst the Dunces, an embodiment of mediocrity, a designation repeated in Oldham’s Satyr, In Imitation of the Third of Juvenal, where his poverty is both artistic and literal: Pordage “had nothing, all the world does know,” and his miserable circumstances are a reflection of his negligible abilities (Poems 255).

The depth of such contempt reveals a problem that has dogged the reception history of the period from Dryden to Pope, particularly. Pordage’s fighting on the other side of the literary and political divide did not necessarily vitiate his writings. Yet, as Samuel Johnson wrote (describing the reputation of Sir Richard Blackmore, targeted far more substantially by two generations of satirists), “Contempt is a kind of gangrene, which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees” (3.83). The low opinion applied repeatedly to Pordage would rub off on the reception of his works: a reader introduced to Pordage by Rochester’s anecdotal disdain, or the insults of Dryden or Oldham, would be more likely to find (or rather assume) such apparent failings and weaknesses in his writings.

Whereas reception history is meant to present a balanced narrative of how works were received, the contempt directed towards Pordage by Rochester and Oldham disturbs the evidence amidst which such a balance is sought. Rochester’s view of Pordage is a witty affirmation of his unashamedly subjective taste (an aristocratic virtue, though not the sole preserve of the nobility), Oldham’s a more bitter version of the same. Modern criticism attempts to understand the reception of literary works through quantifiable evidence, such as sales figures, editions and reprintings, anthologizing, allusions or mentions in other writings, and other indications of reputation. The dismissals of Rochester and Oldham are part of a process which recurs a few decades later (discussed in more detail below), when Pope, Swift and Gay condemn their own enemies to the duncehood of posterity by creating the sort of triumphalist narrative of literary history that is most appealing to their posthumous audiences. Their consequence and poetic success, so the argument runs, ensures that the estimation of Pope or Rochester is accepted, and the mediocrity of a writer like Pordage assured.

The present essay offers some reflections on this anti-Scriblerian counter-narrative, and the modern reception of poetry from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries more generally, looking at the difficulties inherent in fully understanding the workings of such reception. It is also concerned with some qualifications to be considered when interpreting the increased amount of information about the period now available through databases, and other generally enhanced digital and print resources. It does not endorse Rochester’s breezy dismissal, but instead attempts to show how difficult the precise understanding of literary taste remains, for all our apparent modern advances.

I

The possibilities for the modern literary researcher are summed up by Ashley Marshall’s recent discussion of the amount of satiric material now available:

The release of the digitized Burney newspaper collection in 2007 adds immensely to the possibilities already opened up by EEBO and ECCO. The change has the potential to revolutionize the field: we can now test generalizations about this period, generalizations made on the basis of very limited evidence. (37)

To Marshall’s resources can be added the Digital Miscellanies Index at the University of Oxford, a searchable database of the contents of many poetry anthologies from the eighteenth century. 2 The general point is that selectivity in reception history, given the widespread accessibility of research databases, is no longer an option: appeals to a taste being representative or widespread at a certain time can apparently be examined and verified. Quantities of new materials have been unearthed or made widely available through digital resources, and the circulation of older ones revealed in different lights; consequently, by certain measurements, received ideas of taste can potentially be challenged. The question is partly how to interpret this extra information.

Some of these questions of interpretation are self-evident: one obvious caveat concerns the calculation of the influence of a source. If one anthology, for instance, has multiple editions and a large print run, then its use of the poetry of, say, Blackmore or Cowley will reach a wider readership, and it is a more significant vehicle of their reception than a localized publication with few readers. The problem of a database research culture is also its apparent strength: it is a mechanism for producing data, rather than interpreting it, so citations and flattened out results lack context. A reference to a miscellany containing a Cambridge college’s drinking songs could appear as influential, in the abstract, as more important and widely-read anthologies like Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1702), or periodicals such as The Spectator. All contain poetry published at the same point, but one has a far smaller readership and effect. The relatively simple solution is to acknowledge and build in such degrees of influence and popularity (through such factors, where known, as sales figures and circulation, range of readership, and published responses) into ideas of reception.

A more difficult, related problem concerns the need for criticism to attempt to recreate the workings of a past; this can be summarized as the age-old tension between aesthetics and commerce. A modern critical reading of the choices and motives of an eighteenth-century anthologizer or editor, for example, is sometimes predicated on their making decisions for inclusion and exclusion of authors and works upon principles of taste or literary judgment, yet there is evidence that such choices were often made on far more prosaic grounds. The result can be that the apparent basis of a reception history—the supposed evidence for an authorial influence—sometimes has to be heavily qualified.

Examples of such pragmatism by editors or publishers are especially abundant in anthologies. The whole culture of poetic commonplace books and anthologies was rooted in unacknowledged borrowing, where collections were constructed using their predecessors as building-blocks. This seems alien to a world much more attuned to originality and the rights inherent in individual authorship, but the reason for this serial process of lifting from previous works was the simple one of convenience, as using selections from previous anthologies obviated the need to find fresh illustrations for thematic sections, and offered a text ready to be marked up for the printer.

So, the best-known of such anthologies (and the first major one of the century), Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry, was readily cannibalized even by sources that claimed to be offering something different, and correcting Bysshe’s supposed errors of taste: Charles Gildon, in The Complete Art of Poetry (1718) was happy to indulge in such hypocrisy, and copy large parts of his predecessor, while decrying Bysshe’s alleged omissions and lapses. The compilers of the Thesaurus Dramaticus (1724; reprinted in 1737 as The Beauties of the English Stage) also copied huge sections verbatim from Bysshe’s collection (which had by 1724 gone into a fifth edition). By 1757, the truncated title of Samuel Derrick’s The Beauties of Poetry Display’d … Addison, Akinside [sic], Blacklock, Dryden, Gay, Garth, Grey [sic], Milton, Pope might suggest a more contemporary feel, but these recent authors mingled with sections inherited from Bysshe’s arrangement, a process continued when the work was retitled A Poetical Dictionary (1761).

The effect of all this unowned plagiarism on critical understanding of the culture of anthologies and extracts is profound. Given such borrowing, how can it be known that the retention of what appears to a modern critical eye to be a passage from an obscure poem in anthologies through the century is any measure of the influence, relevance, or popularity of the passage or its author? Do such judgments of supposed obscurity have to be re-evaluated, or is it merely a form of recycling and adapting, in a literary milieu where authorship and property was less immediately important than providing relevant matter for print? Or is this latter view in turn a value-judgment about the ways in which an eighteenth-century reader perceived and consumed anthologized materials? The result is that it is impossible to measure such extracts using conventional understandings of their influence; their presence may instead be indicative only of the editors’ skill in utilizing whatever materials they inherited.

An example of this can be found within the thematic heading, popular to all such anthologies, of “Beauty,” where a glance at the best-known collections reveals some significant congruence: Bysshe, in 1702, uses the first stanza of Cowley’s “Beauty” (1.22). By 1761, and Derrick’s A Poetical Dictionary, the thematic heading is greatly enlarged, with a much wider range of texts before 1650 (Bysshe’s general starting point) and after 1740 – from Ben Jonson and Shakespeare up to Thomson and Lyttleton. This obviously reflects the shifting popularity of certain poets since Bysshe’s first appearance in 1702, but there is still some overlap: the same quotation from Cowley’s “Beauty” is included (1.83), and presumably copied from Bysshe.

What is striking, given the subject with which this essay began, is that two more illustrations of beauty are taken from Elijah Fenton’s tragedy Mariamne of 1723: “What art thou beauty! / Whose charm makes sense and valour grow as tame / As a blind turtle,” and the longer description of how “Mariamne with superior charms / Triumphs over reason … majesty / Streams from her eye to each beholder’s heart, / And checks the transport which her charms inspire” (1.88). It might appear, superficially, that Fenton’s most effective or memorable passages had survived in anthologies for nearly forty years, with their artistry endorsed by Derrick. But such longevity is soon called into question by these same passages being selected to illustrate “Beauty” in 1724, in the Thesaurus Dramaticus (1.28) from whence (or from the 1737 reprint) Derrick probably copied them. Furthermore, examining Fenton’s text shows that they are from two speeches on consecutive pages so early in the play (pages 3 and 4) as to imply a functional rather than aesthetic process of selection by the editors of the Thesaurus, scanning plays for requisite dramatic illustrations. This could still be evidence of the popularity and influence of Mariamne, of course, in Fenton’s original or in its stripped-down garb; it cannot be assumed that repeatedly anthologized materials were included only for practical purposes, and did not please readers at all. Equally, though, Derrick’s use of materials from decades earlier could show that such extracts were only kept in circulation within the unchanging aspic of a thematic anthology, rather than being widely read or appreciated, and are not remotely reflective of taste. Such are the peculiarities of the constructions of eighteenth-century poetic anthologies, which require a different and more flexible mode of understanding than the traditional assumptions of a printed presence being commensurate with (and evidence of) influence and popularity.

Another salient factor in the understanding of poetic reception, given the recent large increase in information through databases such as EEBO and ECCO, is not often given sufficient attention. This is the considerable problem inherent in the assumption of a homogenized taste that can be assumed to reflect a period, whether a span of years or era. Such a unified readership has never existed.

It is entirely plausible that the taste of a readership is always rooted a generation at least in its separate pasts; that is to say, formed at a certain point, with corresponding values and models of literary taste which are the basis (consciously or not) for future judgment. This is not procrustean, and dismissive of works which differ from its ideals (though this can, of course, happen) so much as rooted in a formative experience which evolves into a critical standard, whether in agreement with or reaction against cultural norms. This can in some respects be explicated via an ambiguous chestnut of reception theory, Hans Robert Jauss’s “Erwartungshorizont,” translated as the “horizon of expectations,” that readers bring to a text. Although these horizons are more often examined today as a sociological phenomenon, they also indicate shifts in taste: as these expectations alter and shift through generations, “the audience experiences formerly successful works as outmoded, and withdraws its appreciation” (Jauss 26–27). This can also be inverted, so that readerly expectations rooted in the past define their judgment toward works of the present, sometimes negatively. Jauss saw the need for reception history to “achieve the dimension of a literary history of readers” (27), and acceptance of the heterogeneity of taste across the generations of experience amongst any readership is a necessary part of such a process: every readerly horizon is potentially different, and the critic cannot assume stability or fixity of taste within an audience.

These ideas become helpful when considering the example of the foremost English literary critic of the century, Samuel Johnson. Even in his lifetime, much of the controversy surrounding Johnson’s tastes (and particularly his less than glowing descriptions of recent poets such as Gray, Collins, and Akenside, in The Lives of the Poets) concerned Johnson’s failure to appreciate modern and contemporary poetry. Anna Seward, who accused Johnson many times of critical perfidy following the completion of the Lives in 1781, bemoaned once that Johnson would not “allow Chatterton a place in these volumes in which Pomfret and Yalden were admitted. So invincible were his grudging and surly prejudices—enduring long-deceased genius but ill—and contemporary genius not at all” (5.273). That the (to Seward) grudging “Life of Milton” endured its subject is exacerbated by the folly of his including such poetasters, while rejecting a poet such as Thomas Chatterton. This ignores the salient fact that Johnson was commissioned by booksellers to write biographies to accompany their choices. This consortium of booksellers, obviating piracy, included works for which they owned the copyrights. There was some flexibility, and Johnson could have tried to persuade Thomas Payne, part of the consortium, to include Chatterton, but it is hardly surprising—given the opprobrium surrounding the authenticity of Chatterton’s Rowley poems in the 1770s—that he chose not to do so.

Johnson argued with the booksellers who commissioned the Lives for the inclusion of four poets (Bonnell 139). These were John Pomfret (1667–1702), Thomas Yalden (1670–1736), Isaac Watts (1674–1748), and Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729). All these writers belong to Johnson’s youth: born in 1709, his literary judgment and standards would have developed and been confirmed in the 1720s and 1730s. A poem like Blackmore’s Creation (1712) would thus be of more significance, hence his lobbying for the inclusion of Blackmore on the strength of the Creation alone. Given that his poetic taste was rooted in the years before 1740, it is not surprising to find him sometimes lukewarm about some more recent writers, whom he wrote about in the Lives because he was paid to do so, rather than out of profound enthusiasm.

Johnson’s dislike of much modern poetry mingled with his suspicion of the excessive praise of the contemporary and new for its own sake. This explains some of the more trenchant parts of the Lives: in Johnson’s eyes a poet like Thomas Gray had been flattered and over-praised by admirers (Johnson 4.478–80), and it is this false critical currency that mistakes the pretentious fashionability of his Pindaric Odes for the sublime; Gray’s “art and his struggle are too visible, and there is too little appearance of ease and nature” (4.183). Johnson’s hostility to such poetry according to Roger Lonsdale “is in itself a perverse tribute to the fundamental change in poetic taste” embodied in such works (Johnson 1.163). This change of taste is also reflected in William Collins, who for Johnson obscured the lyric clarity of his poetry in a “deviation in quest of mistaken beauties” (4.121). Even when praising Thomson, it is notable that Johnson’s analogies are to the past: “his mode of thinking, and of expressing his thoughts, is original. His blank verse is no more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other poet, than the rhymes of Prior are the rhymes of Cowley” (4.103). The frame of reference stops where Thomson starts, in the 1720s (see also Reddick 138–40, on Johnson’s reduction of citations to Thomson in the Dictionary). When this idea of his poetic canon being relatively fixed by 1740 is considered, the elderly Johnson’s partial critique of Gray, Collins and others seems entirely predictable.

Johnson’s disdain for contemporary poetry is a useful example of how difficult it is to assume that the reception of a writer at a certain point represents a consensual or universal view. Earlier in the century, a different lack of consensus would operate: readers of, say, Abraham Cowley in the 1730s would include those who grew up on his writings toward the end of the seventeenth century, those (like Johnson) who can be presumed to have read him frequently, and those for whom he was of less relevance than contemporary writers such as Pope and Swift. How can such a diversity of reading experiences and inherited tastes be unified, except with reductive simplifications about the zeitgeist or temper of the time ensuring that Cowley’s writing fell into disrepair? Only through according evidence of reception with different levels of significance. Given instances of many citations to poets in databases, allusions to them in the writings of others, and references to them in literature generally, some such instances must be of greater consequence, and some of less. The difficulty is in assigning these degrees of consequence.

II

A pertinent example of distinguishing between types of evidence in poetic reception is Sir Richard Blackmore. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Blackmore’s critical appearances were infrequent, and the opinion of one who had turned the pages of some of his vast epic poems seemed representative: “I have not read all of his verse, but my bibliography will show that I have suffered enough” (Fairchild, 189, qtd. in Boys 35–36). This was the image of the poet captured by Dryden’s travesty of Blackmore’s composition in his “Prologue” to The Pilgrim (1700): “At leisure Hours, in Epique Song he deals, / Writes to the rumbling of his Coaches Wheels” (16.264), a mockery of Blackmore’s declaration of writing some of his many lines of verse between his appointments as a physician; what could now be described as multi-tasking becomes a symbol of his meretricious production of endless poetry to the dull predictable rhythms of his transport, without requiring much individual agency or control.

The same image would be invoked by Pope in the mock-notes to the second book of The Dunciad Variorum, where Blackmore wins the tedium contest: “All hail him victor in both gifts of song, / Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long” (Dunciad 187). Less well-known but even more contemptuous is a stinging poem associated with Gay into the nineteenth century, but now attributed to Pope, “Verses: to Be Placed under a Picture of Sir Richard Blackmore, England’s Arch-Poet:”

See who ne’er was, nor will be half read!

Who first sung Arthur, then sung Alfred,

Praised great Eliza in God’s anger,

Till all true Englishmen cry’d,
hang her!

Made William’s virtues wipe the bare A—

And hang’d up Marlborough in Arras 3 (Poems 494)

The mockery runs from Blackmore’s epic Whig allegories on the English monarchy, Prince Arthur (1695), King Arthur (1697), Eliza (1705) and Alfred (1723), to his more topical celebration of the Duke of Marlborough’s victory at Ramillies, Advice to the Poets (1706). Works that seem intended as Whig panegyric are quickly condemned, it would appear, as obsequious poetasting.

This description of Blackmore’s career has recently been challenged, with the suggestion that it is a critical view that distorts the very possibility of reading and comprehending such writers: David Womersley has argued that it is impossible to look at poems like Advice to the Poets objectively, “so thoroughly have our ideas of the poetry of the period been saturated with the inimical values and preferences of the Scriblerians” (xxiv). The potential critic of Blackmore has been unconsciously jaundiced by the successful absorption of the witty views of his enemies into the critical mainstream. History is, as usual, written by the winners. Similarly, Abigail Williams has suggested that the “essentially ad hominem” Tory and Scriblerian attacks on Blackmore (like the satire of the supposed pedantries of Richard Bentley) were motivated by their target’s qualities, including “earnestness,” alongside “a disregard for fashionable savoir faire” and “relatively humble social backgrounds” (37).

Such arguments have opened up the once moribund world of Blackmore’s Whig poetics to unlikely attention. They also point to the wider premise of the present essay – that some elements of poetic reception are of far more importance than others, as opposed to a flat enumeration of reception through weight of results, citations, or appearances. The mockery of Dryden and Pope egged on the impression of readers, and perhaps ensured that Blackmore was not given the attention he deserved.

Yet this in turn points to a wider problem, and a sort of hermeneutic circle about how predictive and effectual such a Tory criticism of Blackmore could be. Blackmore’s career follows a trajectory, where the initial popularity of Prince Arthur and its author’s battles with the Wits up to the second decade of the eighteenth century is followed by a drop in his appeal, with some alleviation, notably the huge, atypical success of his Creation: A Philosophical Poem (1712), a defense of Christianity and refutation of Lucretius. 4 He then fell further away, in terms of poetic reputation, with little evidence of a readership after the 1720s.

It is the nature of this falling-away, whether it was the inevitable fate of a topical and politically involved writer, or a result of the attacks of Blackmore’s enemies, which is disputed. Harry Solomon has pointed to Pope’s repeated use of Blackmore’s poetry in Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry of 1727 (as examples of redundancy, mixed metaphor, emptiness, and generally false profundity) as having a devastating impact on his reputation. Certainly it did Blackmore little good to be described as “The great Author, from whose Treasury we have drawn all these Instances (the Father of the Bathos, and indeed the Homer of it)” (Art 25). Conversely, as the editor of Pope’s mock-poetic recipe book points out, by the time of Peri Bathous “the feud between Blackmore and the Wits had all but subsided,” as had much of Blackmore’s public career” (107). It is thus impossible to support Solomon’s claim that “Pope’s destruction of Blackmore in Peri Bathos had ended Creation’s astonishing popularity” (26), when it is considered that such popularity might well have dwindled anyway, given that Creation had been published fifteen years before, had gone through new editions (in 1713, 1715, 1718, and 1727 in Dublin) and would see another issue of the fourth London edition in 1736. Then, the rest is silence, until 1780, when the poem was republished alongside Johnson’s “Life of Blackmore.”

The problem is that it is impossible to prove that Pope’s scorn precipitated a decline: as Solomon admits (45), Pope never mocks the poem itself in Peri Bathous, and it is significant in its absence from his repeated satire of its author elsewhere. Furthermore, the erosion of Blackmore’s poetic fame had already begun. In the second book of the Dunciad, the mocking note on Blackmore’s sonorous strains quotes selectively from a description of Blackmore in Characters of the Times, a pamphlet defending writers attacked in the preface to the 1727 Pope/Swift Miscellany, the full passage of which declares that “Sir Richard has not for many years been so much as nam’d, or even thought of among Writers, as such; and whom no-one except P-pe, would have had ill-nature enough to revive” (Dunciad 188). Pope did not publish the comment critical of his “ill nature” in the variorum notes, the clear implication of which is that rather than destroying Blackmore’s respectable post-Creation reputation, Pope was the only person who was rude enough to draw attention to him and his otherwise forgotten verse. While Pope’s representation of Blackmore might indeed be a mean-spirited caricature, by 1728 he seems already to have begun to be forgotten; the degree to which Pope could prejudice Blackmore’s potential readership was as limited as that readership itself.

Blackmore maintained a considerable reputation before this decline: John Dennis in 1716 damned Pope’s facetiousness by praising the Creation, “which Poem alone is worth all the Folios, that this Libeller [Pope] will ever write, and which will render its Author the delight, and Admiration of Posterity” (2.107). Such praise of Blackmore is often in defiance of the implied criticism of him by the Wits. Richard Boys quotes the anonymous contemporary marginalia in a copy of Prince Arthur, which shakes its fist at the assumed denigration of the author by the fashionable: “Let them say what they please, damn them, this is a great epick poem” (36). Even if this was in reaction, it is part of the wider praise of Blackmore, which gives the lie to the impression of his being universally assailed by enemies, whether followers of Dryden, or Scriblerian. On the contrary, there was always some support for him, from Isaac Watts in his preface to Horae Lyricae (1706), and William Molyneux’s claim to John Locke in 1700 after reading King Arthur, that Blackmore was second only to Milton amongst English poets, and the rest “mere ballad-makers” in comparison (qtd. in Boys 26). It is a surprising verdict, but not one that Locke contradicted, and as Boys suggests (while compiling such examples), “This sympathy points out once again the error of regarding the views of the fashionable poets as the only opinions of the times” (32).

Blackmore found influential supporters during his battles with Dryden and Pope; as his audience lessened, far fewer voices can be found, but this is not necessarily a consequence of Scriblerian mockery. The ostensibly neutral evidence from databases is that reprintings of Blackmore’s work and his appearances in anthologies and miscellanies became less frequent after 1720. He is cited in the Digital Miscellanies Index forty-eight times: twenty-nine of these are before 1720, and he does not appear after 1760. The majority of these citations are to his most popular and widely-read poems, Prince Arthur and Creation.5

Such statistical evidence is telling. After the mid-century and before Johnson’s Lives, the most positive view of Blackmore is the short biography of him by Robert Shiels (erstwhile amanuensis on Johnson’s Dictionary) in the collection of Lives of the Poets of Great Britain published under Theophilus Cibber’s authorship in 1753. Shiels approves of Blackmore’s taking a stand for virtue and morality (bohemian ne’er-do-wells Samuel Boyse and Richard Savage are condemned in the same volume), chides the wits for their unfair attacks, and presents Blackmore generally as a dignified figure in the face of unwarranted criticism: “The poem for which Sir Richard had been most celebrated, was, undoubtedly, his Creation, now deservedly become a classic” (Cibber 5.182). On his death in 1729, Blackmore “left behind the character of a worthy man, a great poet, and a friend to religion” (5.184). How lasting this stature actually was, rather than what Shiels’s considered Blackmore deserved, is ambiguous. The reader has to decide whether this view is representative, or a singular and eccentric judgment which asserts something it cannot support.

The antitype to Shiels can be found in the poetry of Robert Lloyd, friend of Charles Churchill, member of the “Nonsense Club” and erstwhile satirist of poetic styles, who opined in 1763 in his “On Rhyme,” after praising Milton and Dryden,

For who can bear to read or hear,

Tho’ not offensive to the ear,

The mighty BLACKMORE gravely sing

Of ARTHUR PRINCE, and ARTHUR KING,

Heroic poems without number,

Long, lifeless, leaden, lulling lumber;
Nor pity such laborious toil,

And loss of midnight time and oil?

(2.114)

It is telling here that Blackmore’s verse might be monotonous, but not incompetent so much as redundant in its glib immensity and absence of wider imaginative spark, a claim often made about writings whose time at the forefront of public taste has passed. Lloyd might not be representative of opinions of Blackmore’s poetry in the 1760s, but his is the only one that has come down to posterity.

In the same decade, Blackmore still appeared in the ninth edition of Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1762), though this is ambivalent proof of longevity, as not every edition of Bysshe’s anthology added new extracts. The expansion stopped, as A. Dwight Culler demonstrated, in the sixth edition of 1718, by which point it had reached 2,693 quotations, consisting (intriguingly, for understandings of taste) of the following authors: “Dryden (1,201 quotations), Pope (155), Cowley (143), Butler (140), Otway (127), Blackmore (125), Shakespeare (118), Milton (117), Rowe (116), Lee (104), Garth (59), Waller (44), and a number of minor Restoration poets” (868). This shows how relevant Blackmore may have been to a readership in the 1710s, but by 1762, the contents of Art of Poetry had not been revised for forty-four years, nor reprinted since 1737. Its quotations from Blackmore’s works are therefore happenstance, and not obviously relevant to the contemporary poetic world of Gray and Ossian; indeed, Blackmore is entirely absent from anthologies based on Bysshe’s thematic model but using more explicitly contemporary verse, such as Derrick’s Beauties of Poetry Display’d (1757).

One other pertinent example of mid-century anthology reprinting was an allusion to Blackmore in Robert Dodsley’s hugely popular and influential Collection of Poems by Several Hands, which started out in 1748 as a three-volume work, and had expanded to six by 1758. The first volume of 1748 contains two satires by James Bramston (1694?–1744). The second of these, The Man of Taste (first published in 1733), acknowledges its debt to Pope’s Epistle to Burlington, though Bramston’s satire is a blunt instrument in comparison. Bramston’s narrator’s supposed taste is notable by its absence, as he makes one clumsy erroneous judgment after another, including his thought that “Though Blackmore’s works my soul with raptures fill, / With notes by Bentley they’d be better still” (Dodsley 1.314). This precursor to Johnson’s Dick Minim manages to fit in two of Pope’s leading butts, drawing on the notoriety of Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost in 1732, the previous year to Bramston’s poem. It is neither a profound nor damaging dig at Blackmore’s reputation and more of an ancillary to Pope’s ridicule elsewhere, but its presence in Dodsley’s Collection ensured that Bramston’s whimsical satire reached a large audience for decades after its conception, as part of a hugely influential, often reprinted and widely circulated miscellany.

Sifting through the various pieces of evidence for Blackmore’s reception strongly suggests that, Shiels apart, there was little positive attention paid to him by the middle of the eighteenth century; it is true that the available databases do not claim to be entirely comprehensive in their contents, and that some mentions of Blackmore might have escaped notice. Yet on the existing evidence, Blackmore was not often anthologized between 1740 and 1780, and allusions to his work tend to the pejorative: James Beattie, in his Essays of 1776, discusses laughter and the bathos, citing Blackmore’s biblical paraphrases as examples of ludicrous composition, where the “meanness of his words and figures” produce unintentional hilarity because Blackmore lacked “an adequate sense of the dignity of the subject” (364).

With these examples in mind, it can perhaps be argued that the insulting attacks of Pope and others hastened the decline of Blackmore’s canon, yet there is scant evidence that he would have maintained a readership anyway: it may be that his works, even with the partial exceptions of Prince Arthur and Creation, would not have found a lasting readership beyond the immediate decades of their publication and initial reception, regardless of the squibs directed against their author. Writers like Bramston may have jumped on the Popean satiric bandwagon in the 1730s, but there is no such impetus or motive behind the dismissals of Blackmore’s work by Lloyd, or Beattie.

Amongst these suggestive citations and allusions, some (such as the printing in Dodsley’s Collection) are more influential and widespread than others, and there is one decisive indicator of Blackmore’s reception: Johnson’s “Life” of him and the circumstances of its inclusion in the Lives of the Poets in 1780, which is far easier to interpret in intention and effect than anecdotes or parodies. Johnson intervened, and added Blackmore to the collection planned by the booksellers to prevent possible pirated editions of British Poets; that the booksellers did not originally intend Blackmore to be one of the many poets comprising the edition implies that his stock had fallen considerably by the 1770s. Johnson’s inclusion of him in the Lives gave his reputation some impetus, which would be sustained in collections of poets into the early nineteenth century.

Johnson’s pragmatic reason for the inclusion of Blackmore was the importance of his Creation, as a religious poem, and on its own merits: “This poem, if he had written nothing else, would have transmitted him to posterity among the first favorites of the English muse,” he declared (3.79). In arguing for a specific part of the poetry of someone from the early century, Johnson guaranteed that he would be accused of supporting the obsolete at the expense of the contemporary, and so it proved; William Cowper mockingly suggested in a letter that Johnson might aid his reputation: “Let him only speak as favorably of me as he has spoken of Sir Richard Blackmore (who, though he shines in his poem called Creation, has written more absurdities in verse than any writer of our country), and my success will be secured” (18 September 1781; 1.521). Cowper, no friend to Johnson, knew that the latter was right at least in his praise of Creation. Others were less charitable, and the following epigram is characteristic:

Yon Ass in vain the flow’ry lawns invite;

To mumble thistles his supreme delight.
Such is the Critic, who with wayward pride

To Blackmore gives the praise to Pope denied;

(Potter 11)

That Robert Potter interpreted the “Life of Pope” as mean-spirited suggests the extent of his poetic idolatry, and ensures a misreading of Johnson’s views of both him and Blackmore.

Johnson’s standing up for Blackmore was not widely approved; his transparent inclusion of him in the Lives because of the importance of Creation (and pointedly not for most of his other poetry) was ignored, and his supposed motives ridiculed. But nevertheless, his defense of Blackmore is the most significant example in his reception, in that it offers direct evidence for the decline in Blackmore’s critical fortunes; the flat information offered by databases informs the researcher that new editions of Blackmore’s work and references to him emerge from 1780 after decades of relative neglect, yet the necessity for Johnson’s “Life” of him both shows his stock had fallen, and reminds the modern reader that Johnson’s own view of poetry had, by the 1770s, largely been challenged by the emergent tastes of a younger generation. This is not proof of such things (nor does it show why Blackmore’s audience declined), but it is as near to it as patterns of reception in something as often arbitrary and anecdotal as literary history will offer.

The modern critic is better placed than ever to understand the mechanics of such history, in terms of raw data. The challenge is to draw from this information a nuanced interpretation of a quality as malleable as taste. It is a challenge that can be fulfilled only by considering some kinds of evidence to be of greater importance: throwaway remarks or incidental mentions do not have the momentum or consequence of something like Johnson’s “Life of Blackmore” as an intervention in his reputation; a prevalence of critical material might indicate a consensus, but there is still likely to be dissent. Some information might appear to be richly suggestive, but cannot be reconciled with the idea of homogenous, widely shared taste: reasons for the anthologizing of popular works or extracts can be ambiguous, and prosaic, rather than artistic; the modern perception of an author might exaggerate the extent to which their works were widely regarded. The general need is for the gauging of what evidence of reception might mean, without excess of speculation, resisting the assumption that all material concerning an author’s reception is as equal in significance as in its appearance in a citation index. Taste cannot be fully quantified, but the most important factors behind it can be separated and better understood.

University of Nottingham

THE REIGN of Queen Anne (1702−1714) is cited throughout the Anglophone eighteenth century as a brief, gleaming exception to the Dunciadic norm of neglected literary merit, the age in which Joseph Addison was made Secretary of State and Matthew Prior was sent to negotiate the end of the war with France. During the co-premiership of Robert Harley and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, writers of a Tory persuasion enjoyed the confidence of politicians of remarkable literary sensitivity. Accordingly, the dramatic military and diplomatic events of these years were overstocked with poetic recognition. As Johnson ruefully remarked, in comparing the literary response to the Nine Years’ War, the War of Spanish Succession and the Seven Years’ War:

Every thing has its day. Through the reigns of William and Anne no prosperous event passed undignified by poetry. In the last war, when France was disgraced and overpowered in every quarter of the globe, when Spain, coming to her assistance, only shared her calamities, and the name of an Englishman was reverenced through Europe, no poet was heard amidst the general acclamation; the fame of our counsellors and heroes was entrusted to the Gazetteer. (3.51)

While subsequent literary critics have found it difficult to build a canonical bridge between “Restoration Literature” (1660−1690) and the maturity of Alexander Pope (1710−1744) for much of the eighteenth century this critical twenty year “gap” was perceived as a golden age of public poetry, an age when gifted writers enjoyed unprecedented and unrepeated access to the corridors of very serious decision making. The fact that the Seven Years’ War (1756−1763) was productive of military victories rather more sweeping and impressive than those gained at the beginning of the century only reinforces a sense of strange relative literary decline. It is as though, in the course of five decades, poetry succeeded in losing in prestige what it had gained in autonomy.

The nineteenth century had little time for Matthew Prior, regarding him as somewhat trivial and lightweight. A post-romantic critical landscape lacks the categories to appreciate Prior’s distinctive strengths. Furthermore, the nineteenth century, following Wordsworth, tended to regard poetry as a distinct vocation, incompatible with high-level professional public engagements. The project of this article, however, is to recover an appreciative context for Prior which regards political diplomacy not as a distraction from Prior’s poetic vocation but rather as something that defines the shape and the scope of his literary imagination. I will suggest that the exercise of diplomatic accommodation informs both the preoccupations and the techniques that sustain Prior’s enduring interest.

More recent Prior scholarship is bafflingly meagre enough to summarize within a paragraph. In 1939, Matthew Prior, Poet and Diplomatist by Charles Kenneth Eves appeared, offering a careful and detailed biography which serves to reinforce an essential bifurcation of Prior’s identity as poet and diplomat. Indeed, the book is awkwardly poised in terms of vindicating the significance of its subject and the reader is left suspecting that Prior’s poetry is brought in when the diplomacy is less than impressive and that Prior’s diplomacy is discussed when the poetry appears to drag. Frances Mayhew Rippy’s Matthew Prior, published in 1986, attempts a survey of Prior’s entire body of work, but the brevity of the volume precludes any extended interpretive effort.

These studies stress the peculiarities of Prior’s social position. Prior was acutely conscious of punching above and below his weight. Famously of very humble birth (in Johnson’s phrase “one of those that have burst out from an obscure original to great eminence”) the London-raised son of a Dorsetshire joiner was socially over-promoted and personally under-promoted, hitting a glass ceiling imposed by the snobbish Queen Anne. While Prior performed many, if not most, of the duties of an ambassador, the official post of ambassador to the Court of Versailles would actually be enjoyed by the Earl of Shrewsbury. Indeed, Prior serves to problematize the entire concept of “working-class poet.” There is a tendency to remove poets from such categories if they succeed in bettering themselves to the extent to which they rub shoulders with the great and the good on something like equal terms. The case of Matthew Prior invites discussion of the extent to which the term “peasant poet” demands that its representatives “play the part” of recognisable rusticity like Stephen Duck? Although Prior’s father appears to have acquired enough property to appear on tax records, Prior’s grandfather is generally assumed to have been a farm labourer, evidencing a remarkably rapid trajectory of advancement within just two generations (Eves 2-6).

The perception of Prior as an occasional or amateur poet is all the more paradoxical given that he was the author of that rarest of things, a volume of original poetry which netted a significant amount of money. He became, as Rippy notes, “one of the earliest examples of a writer supported handsomely by the reading public rather than by wealthy patrons” (43). This is especially striking when it is recalled that Pope’s significant literary earnings came from his Homeric translations. The 1718 edition of Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions secured no fewer than 1445 subscribers, thanks chiefly to the active solicitations of his influential friends (a circumstance which perhaps threatens Rippy’s sharp distinction between “reading public” and “patronage”). Despite this commercial success the vision of Prior as a careless and congenial vers de societe poet persists, and with good reason, since Prior himself was eager to cultivate it. The fact that Prior can “pass” as an aristocrat is itself a tribute to his own powers of persuasive self-fashioning. He is not to be blamed for his inability to anticipate the fact that his pedagogic canonicity would have been better served, three hundred years on, had he played up his gnarly plebian professionalism.

A kind of social ambivalence is to be found at the heart of many of Prior’s most personable and confessional poems. He is simultaneously successful beyond the hopes of almost anyone from his background, and uniquely vulnerable to the snobbery and condescension of his contemporaries. Small wonder that his most successful long poem, “Alma,” written while under house arrest in the year of purges and persecutions associated with the Hanoverian and Whig take-over of 1714−1716, is about how identity itself is nomadic and uncertain. “Alma” is a defiantly anti-Cartesian poem that rejects the prison cell of the pineal gland in favour of a very fleshly consciousness that works its way up from the tippy toes of prenatal kicking to the senility of the flaky scalp. A poet who does not know his place considers the philosophical significance of consciousness never knowing its place, based on a kind of organic materialism associated with free-thinking philosophers such as Spinoza and John Toland.1

“Alma” is, of course, a comic poem and its learned wit encourages us to suspect any overt proposition it offers. Fellows is right to provoke suspicion of the assumption that the sympathetic trajectory of the poem is necessarily to be identified with a persona who happens to be called “Mat” rather than “Dick.” Final closure on the “side” of either Mat or Dick is no very necessary expectation of the poem and Dick’s preference for the “belly” as the stabilizing signifier within the system of the human body may merely suggest the current location of Dick’s own “Alma” within its lifelong upward ascent through Dick’s person.

While Prior’s personal identity may seem very fluid and contingent, his sense of national identity appears rather more secure. Although never officially poet laureate, Prior was the most effectively patriotic English poet of his day, the poet with the most efficiently focused sense of national identity. In the 1690s, Prior’s verse was predominantly panegyric, and political panegyric is not a form which has endeared itself to a skeptical posterity. Patriotic panegyric flourished in and yet was troubled by the context of military rivalry. As Arthur S. Williams notes, the “artistic problem – similar to that encountered by Andrew Marvell during the Commonwealth and Restoration – was to deflate the overblown rhetoric of absolutist propaganda without discrediting heroic verse itself” (62). One solution to this problem was to introduce political panegyric in surprising contexts. Even when introducing his longest and most serious religious poem “Solomon,” an over-extended anticipation of Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes,” Prior ensures that the King of Israel sings the praises of a future Britannia – a digression that he unapologetically signposts in his introduction:

I need make no Apology for the short Digressive Panegyric upon GREAT BRITAIN, in the First Book: I am glad to have it observed, that there appears throughout all my Verses a Zeal for the Honor of my Country: and I had rather be thought a good English-man, than the best Poet, or greatest Scholar that ever wrote. (Literary Works 1:309)

Prior is here making no apologies for his patriotism while making extensive apologies for his poetry. This kind of diplomacy informs a peculiar poetic credo that refuses to privilege any kind of autonomous poetic realm or suggest that poetry can survive on “its” own merits. The digressive panegyric to which this signpost refers is not as “short” as his apology suggests:

E’er the progressive Course of restless Age
Performs Three thousand times it’s Annual Stage;
May not our Pow’r and Learning be supprest;
And Arts and Empire learn to travel West?

Where, by the strength of this Idea charm’d,
Lighten’d with Glory, and with Rapture warm’d,
Ascends my Soul! what sees She White and Great
Amidst subjected Seas? An ISLE, the Seat
Of Pow’r and Plenty, Her imperial Throne,
For Justice and for Mercy sought and known;
Virtues Sublime, great Attributes of Heav’n,
From thence to this distinguish’d Nation given:
Yet farther West the Western ISLE extends
Her happy Fame; her Armed Fleets She sends
To Climates folded yet from human Eye,
And Lands which We imagine Wave and Sky;
From Pole to Pole she hears her Acts resound,
And rules an Empire by no Ocean bound;
Knows her Ships anchor’d, and her Sails unfurl’d,
In other INDIES and a second World.

Long shall BRITANNIA (That must be her Name)
Be first in Conquest, and preside in Fame:
Long shall her favour’d Monarchy engage
The Teeth of Envy and the Force of Age;
Rever’d and Happy, She shall long remain
Of human Things least changeable, least vain;
Yet All must with the gen’ral Doom comply,
And this Great Glorious Pow’r tho’ last must dye.
(Literary Works 1:323)

This passage is almost shamelessly obtrusive in the context of a theological extrapolation of the satiety of an Old Testament monarch. The heavily caesural lines in praise of Britain’s maritime splendour gives way at last to the more fluid lines that conclude the section that anticipates the inevitable extinction of British power, carrying the implication that even British imperial decline will be a dignified affair. It is never explained why King Solomon should be granted a vision of British naval imperialism except (ostensibly) to mark the ultimate transience of the most stable and long lasting political realities. The effect of the passage in context is to make the reader feel taken out of the poem on a maritime excursion and the obtrusive quality of the digression provokes a sense of imbalance within the poem as a whole. It is notable that a poet who has given up writing military panegyrics and who has been a political victim of political interests opposed to this negotiated conclusion to the war praises a maritime/commercial Britain rather than its continental army. This digression praises Britain but ignores Blenheim, in part because his Tory sympathies were now estranged from the supposed ambitions of the Churchills. By the latter part of Queen Anne’s reign, the glories of the Battle of Blenheim (1704) appeared, from a Tory perspective, tarnished by the warmongering vainglory of John and Sarah Churchill. Indeed, Prior’s metrical acceptance of the eventual limits placed on any nation’s martial glory may represent an implied rebuke to whiggish warmongering.

For most of Prior’s adult life, English and (after 1707) British national identity had been defined in terms of an on-and-off conflict with France. As a consequence a poet who celebrates England and/or Britain defines himself in terms of an on-and-off conflict with Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, dominant figure within the académie française and, since 1677, historiographer royal to Louis XIV. Prior’s relationship with Boileau becomes intertwined with England (and later Britain’s) relationship with France and the consequent sense of Britain’s relative status and purpose within a larger European context.

Boileau, celebrated author of Lutrin, translator of Horace’s Ars Poetique and of Longinus’s On the Sublime, is less celebrated as the author of a number of military odes to Louis XIV. The evident relish with which Boileau balanced his iambic lines with piles of dead Englishmen made it inevitable that when fortune turned against the French cause, Boileau would be caught in the poetic firing line. Boileau’s reputation did and did not suffer in England as a consequence. For example, Nicholas Rowe, in his introduction to John Ozell’s 1708 translation of Boileau’s Lutrin, regards translation itself as a form of appropriation, while Ozell’s own dedication to the same translation makes explicit reference to recent military victories so as to argue that Lutrin itself has become, in a sense, spoils of war and can submit to the rule of the English language just as various Flemish towns have been wrested from French control. The “prisoner of war” idea is made even more explicitly when Ozell politely declares, “I hope I have us’d him with that Civility which is due to one of the First Figures in the Commonwealth of Learning. I was going to say, with that Civility with which our Country-Men treat His at Litchfield and Nottingham” (Boileau’s Lutrin xvii). Indeed, the entire tenor of the dedication indicates not so much a faithful rendering of the great Boileau as a capture of Boileau, who is to be paraded in English dress for the amusement of post-Blenheimite readers:

[I]t has been thought by some as rash an Attempt to translate this French Author, as for an English General to attack an army of theirs. The late Successes of some former Campaigns have sufficiently prov’d that their Heroes are not Invincible; and the happy Imitations of some of their best Pieces, that their Writers are not Incomparable. (Boileau’s Lutrin xvi)

The history of Prior’s relationship with Boileau is complicated. The earliest reference to Boileau in Prior’s work is at the conclusion of his ambitious military “Ode in Imitation of Horace” (1692):

In vain Ye Gallic Muses Strive
With Labour’d Verse to keep his Fame alive.
Your costly Monuments in vain you raise
On the weak Basis of his mould’ring Praise.
Against his will you chain your frighted King
To rapid Rhines divided Bed,
Whence in the Anguish of his Soul he fled;
You mock the Hero whilst you Sing,
The wounds for which he never bled:
Falsehood dos Poyson on your Verse infuse
And Loüis fear gives death to Boileau’s Muse.
(Literary Works 1:117)

The imbalance between propaganda and reality is so extreme that panegyric itself becomes a kind of torture. A further prod at Boileau is provided by “On the taking of Huy” (1695). Huy had surrendered to the French two years earlier without a shot being fired. 1693 was also, significantly, the last occasion on which Louis XIV saw fit to command his forces in person.

THE Town which Loüis bought, the King reclaims
And brings instead of Bribes avenging Flames.
Now Louis take Thy Titles from above,
Boileau shal Sing and We’ll believe Thee Jove.
Jove gain’d his Mistress with alluring Gold
But Jove like Thee was impotent and Old:
Active and Young he did like William stand,
And Stunn’d the Dame, his Thunder in his Hand.
(Literary Works 1:130)

The diminutive William of Orange (the extent of whose full bloodied commitment to heterosexual congress was the subject of much speculation in the 1690s) is inflated by Prior into a bold ravisher of “Huy,” while Boileau’s inflated Jovian Louis is reduced to a geriatric plutocratic impotence.2 The gold which purchased Huy has also prostituted the talents of Boileau. Jove, like William, “stands” priapic with masculine confidence—a confidence that is immediately transferred from the Olympian deity to the Orange monarch. The focus of Prior’s abuse remains Louis and not Boileau, and indeed Boileau is implicitly complimented for doing so well with such unpromising materials.

Boileau is also Prior’s direct addressee on a number of occasions. “An English Ballad” (1695) commemorates the retaking of Namur and is a satire on a rather sanguinary poem that Boileau had written upon the occasion of the original taking of Namur. It is published side by side with Boileau’s original poem and although not a line by line parody, is a deliberate and careful exercise in one-upmanship in which military and literary conquests go hand in hand.

Now let us look for LOUIS’ Feather,
That us’d to shine so like a Star:
The Gen’rals could not get together.
Wanting that Influence, great in War.
O Poet! Thou had’st been discreeter,
Hanging the Monarch’s Hat so high;
If Thou hadst dubb’d thy Star, a Meteor,
That did but blaze, and rove, and die.
(Literary Works 1:149)

Again, Boileau’s talent for panegyric turns out to be self defeating, creating a star that Louis cannot embody, and Louis’ hubristic talent for military bathos is transformed from the intended fixed star into a mere shooting star. Prior illustrates an inherent difficulty with all panegyric verse, the difficulty that the success of such verse is largely contextual and therefore beyond the control of the poet.

Prior did not, of course, have the same European reputation as Boileau, and does not today. It may be conjectured that Prior saw the chief difference between the two poets’ relative status as inextricably bound up with the relative statuses of the two languages, between the lingua franca of international diplomacy and a peripheral language of the north west European archipelago. The Nine Years’ War is fought therefore not merely between the the French and the English, but between French and English. In between the composition of “An English Ballad” and “An Epistle to Boileau” (1704) the Battle of Blenheim transformed the balance of power in Europe and led to the beginnings of an imagined peace. In addition, during the brief interval of peace between the two major wars Prior finally met Boileau in Paris and the two socialized during the summer of 1699. Prior records Boileau going so far as to say that Prior had more genius than anyone in the entire French academy. Accordingly, “A Letter to M. Boileau” (1704) is by far the most polite of Prior’s addresses to his French counterpart:

I grant, old Friend, old Foe (for such We are
Alternate, as the Chance of Peace and War)
That we Poetic Folks, who must retrain
Our Measur’d Sayings in an equal Chain,
Have Troubles utterly unknown to Those,
Who let their Fancy loose in rambling Prose.
(Literary Works 1:222)

Prior was also thirty years younger than Boileau, which makes claims of “Old Friendship” (as well as Old Foeship) somewhat implausible. Again, Prior never criticizes Boileau’s verse but only his enforced subject matter, offering bantering mock sympathy for his plight in having to deal with the Battle of Blenheim. It is notable, of course, that Homeric banter can be no feature of an excruciatingly loud eighteenth-century battlefield. As John Richardson notes, “the great majority of poets simply leave speeches out of the busy, noisy, modern battlefield” (563). Yet Richardson does not enforce the consequence of this cacophony, which is that the Homeric responsibility for vaunting (or sledging) speeches becomes transferred to the poets themselves. Marlborough and Tallard are inaudible to one another on the battlefield and so Prior and Boileau take on this rhetorical obligation themselves, albeit from a very, very safe distance. Indeed, Prior and Boileau are “embedded” commentators in relation to the conflict, not unlike modern uniformed network television “reporters,” part of the conflict they describe and making no effort to disentangle themselves from the events they narrate.

Meanwhile, Prior amusingly points out that many of the Dutch and Germanic victories achieved by Churchill and Savoy are remarkably difficult to either rhyme or scan. By advertising his own lack of facility he is of course advertising his own facility. Self deprecation again serves a patriotic purpose. Prior claims that Boileau is bigger than the cause he serves, while he himself is a good deal smaller. Louis XIV is unworthy of Boileau but William, Anne and Churchill deserve better than Prior. The author of Lutrin, itself a pioneering example of the mock heroic, is not inflated in the same way as Dryden inflates Shadwell but rather illustrates that it is Boileau’s theme, not Boileau himself, that is mock heroic. Of course, argues Prior, Boileau can make a hero out of Louis XIV, but then Boileau can make a hero out of a piece of furniture.

The enforced performance of friendship is only to be expected of a professional diplomat. As a diplomat rather than a soldier, it is Prior’s task to imagine how each military victory affects the terms of a possible negotiated peace. Indeed, peace will be necessary to pay adequate tribute to the achievements of war:

But We must change the Stile — Just now I said,
I ne’er was Master of the tuneful Trade,
Or the small Genius which my Youth could boast
In Prose and Business lies extinct and lost;
Bless’d, if I may some younger Muse excite,
Point out the Game, and animate the Flight:
That from Marseilles to Calais France may know
As we have Conqu’rors we have Poets too;
And either Laurel does in BRITAIN grow.
That, tho’ amongst our selves, with too much Heat,
We sometimes wrangle when we should debate;
(A consequential Ill which Freedom draws;
A bad Effect, but from a Noble Cause:)
We can with universal Zeal advance,
To curb the faithless Arrogance of FRANCE.
Nor ever shall BRITANNIA’s Sons refuse
To answer to thy Master, or thy Muse;
Nor want just Subject for victorious Strains,
While MARLBORO’s Arm eternal Laurel gains,
And where old SPENCER sung, a new ELISA reigns.
(Literary Works 1:226)

While disavowing any particular claim to be a poet, Prior goes on to suggest that military and artistic conquests go together. The final line of this poem evokes a line from Boileau, itself highlighted by Claude Rawson: “Pour chanter un Auguste, il faut être un Virgile” (441). Yet Prior both mocks and inverts this maxim. Prior disavows any claim to be Virgil (perhaps secure in the knowledge that Virgil himself did not claim to be Virgil) while suggesting that new Virgils are inevitable. Strategic modesty (i.e, diplomacy) defines the dominant register of the poem. As Rippy notes, “this is laureate verse in which Prior, amidst praise of Anne and of Marlborough, declines to be a laureate” (53). It is Boileau who makes Louis, but it is Marlbro’s Arm that will make the new Spenser. This suggestion is built upon the implications of a passage close to the conclusion of Prior’s “Carmen Seculare” (1699):

XXXIV
Let Him unite His Subjects Hearts,
Planting Societies for peaceful Arts;
Some that in Nature shall true Knowledge found,
And by Experiment make Precept sound;
Some that to Morals shall recal the Age,
And purge from vitious Dross the sinking Stage;
Some that with Care true Eloquence shall teach,
And to just Idioms fix our doubtful Speech:
That from our Writers distant Realms may know,
The Thanks We to our Monarch owe;
And Schools profess our Tongue through ev’ry Land,
That has invok’d His Aid, or blest His Hand.

XXXV
Let His high Pow’r the drooping Muses rear.
The MUSES only can reward His Care:
‘Tis They that guard the great ATRIDES’ Spoils:
‘Tis They that still renew ULYSSES’ Toils:
To Them by smiling JOVE ’twas giv’n, to save
Distinguish’d Patriots from the Common Grave;
To them, Great WILLIAM’s Glory to recal,
When Statues moulder, and when Arches fall.
(Literary Works 1:177)

This poem praising a monarch who devoted his life to fighting the French culminates with a celebration of a quintessentially French cultural programme. If William’s fame is to endure indefinitely when even marble decays and collapses, then the French example of a literary academy devoted to linguistic consistency needs to be emulated. A monarch who spends most of his reign on horseback is perhaps unlikely to initiate any such cultural patronage. “Carmen Seculare,” the product of a fin de siècle interbellum, therefore marks a moment of professional transition from panegyric applause to diplomatic reflexivity. It is frequent enough habit to elide the Nine Years’ War into the War of Spanish Succession. Certainly the latter grew directly out of the unresolved consequences of the former and these adjacent conflicts are characterized by an uneasy alliance of nations seeking to check the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV. In terms of Prior’s literary/diplomatic career, however, there is a very real distinction to be made between these wars. In the Nine Years’ War it was Prior’s part to inflate England’s feats of arms in order to help secure the best possible peace terms. Prior’s role in forging the Peace of Utrecht, however, involved a far more complex series of accommodations in a context where opposition was as much domestic as foreign. Prior’s changing relationship with Boileau is illustrative of this shift.

French foreign minister Torcy’s account of Matthew Prior’s Negotiations at Fontainebleau in July 1711 evidences Prior as a master of Kissingerian triangular diplomacy. As a diplomat, Prior was acutely aware of the need to permit one’s antagonist a fall back position, to imagine a position which an opposite number can find a way of honourably accepting. The fall back position was, of course, to concede to France, the original and official casus belli – the right of the house of Bourbon to the Spanish throne. The Torcy account also reveals Prior as someone who was able to convert actual weakness into negotiating strength, to the extent to which political vulnerability may even be exaggerated in order to give urgency to a political objective. Accordingly, Prior urged upon France an early peace with “good cop” England in order to stave off the growing power of the “bad cops,” Austria and the Netherlands. Torcy paraphrased Prior accordingly: “Prior… m’asseura que le Roy seroit plus content de la maniere de traitter des Anglois que de celles des Hollandois.”

The Peace of Utrecht required the suspension of long held prejudices. As the most famous Tory apologist for peace, Jonathan Swift remarked in Conduct of the Allies (1711):

To have a prince of the Austrian family on the throne of Spain is undoubtedly more desirable than one of the house of Bourbon; but to have the empire and Spanish monarchy united in the same person is a dreadful consideration, and directly opposite to that wise principle on which the eighth article of the alliance is founded. (Works 6:51)

Swift alludes to the most consistent objective of British foreign policy since the days of Elizabeth: to secure maritime trading routes and avoid large scale continental European entanglements unless it becomes necessary to prevent any one European power from gaining continental hegemony. Ninety per cent of the time this one European power will be France, but on occasion it may be some other power, and foreign policy needs to adjust its practice in order to sustain its central rationale. Once the Austrian House of Hapsburg begins to achieve a degree of pre-eminence that rivals that formerly enjoyed by the French Bourbons, then it is time to negotiate a peace that will preserve a desirable state of European equilibrium. These losses became more keenly appreciated in the wake of the bloody Battle of Malplaquet (1709), a phyrric victory for Marlborough and the allies in which twice as many “victorious” allied forces were casualties than “defeated” French. Malplaquet becomes an occasion when the very meaning of “victory” becomes problematic.3

When attacking the “Conduct of the Allies” who would seek to prolong the War of Spanish Succession, Swift is at his most persuasive when he describes the human and material cost of war, and when he reminds his readers that the end of any war must be a lasting peace, and peace is a prize to be seized as soon as a reasonable percentage of realistic objectives have been secured. As Swift observes:

It pleased God, in the course of this war, to bless the armies of the allies with remarkable successes; by which we were soon put into a condition of demanding and expecting such terms of a peace as we proposed to ourselves when we began the war. But instead of this, our victories only served to lead us on to farther visionary prospects; advantage was taken of the sanguine temper which so many successes had wrought the nation up to; new romantic views were proposed, and the old, reasonable, sober design, was forgot. (Works 6:48)

Diplomacy is the enemy of hubris, personal as well as national. Prior’s longer mature poems, “Alma,” “Solomon,” and “Henry and Emma,” are exercises in argument and diplomacy and each of them lacks closure except of a rather arbitrary kind. Prior was well placed to develop the maxim that all political careers end in failure. The period 1713−1716, between the Treaty of Utrecht and the failure of the first Jacobite rising, appears in retrospect to vindicate a version of peaceful constitutionalism, but for Bolingbroke, Harley and Prior, the lived experience of these years was considerably more frightening. The distinction between support for a politically unpopular cause and outright treason was still evolving.

All of Prior’s dialogic poems represent a quest for a third term, a negotiated space where opposed viewpoints can feel at home. It is tempting to triangulate some of Prior’s more Chaucerian bawdy fables involving various love triangles, in terms of diplomatic strategy. A poet, like a diplomat, confronts divergent elements and strives to bring them to a point of harmonious and elegant closure.

Claude Rawson has argued that Boileau, whose Lutrin was published in the same week as Milton’s revised Paradise Lost, adopts a frankly celebratory attitude to the carnage of modern warfare that is essentially alien not only to the English mock-heroic tradition, but also to Milton himself whose chief and decisive conflicts are bloodless and rhetorical. Rawson, like Richardson, addresses the larger problems with military epic in an age of heavy artillery, the disqualification of individual physical strength as well as the impossibility of staging Homeric taunting exchanges in such a loud environment. However, he also suggests that French literature retained an investment in “straight” military epic long after the most influential of English poets had abandoned it. A critical feature of this disengagement from epic militarism involves the prioritizing need to imagine a peace.

As Prior satirizes Boileau’s sanguinary odes, it is made clear from both text and context that Boileau’s overall reputation remains largely intact. What is being deflated is not so much Boileau the poet but a version of Boileau as the servile panegyrist of Louis. By refusing to offer any hostile commentary on Boileau’s acknowledged masterpieces, Lutrin, Art de Poetique, or his translation of Longinus, Prior is able to make a political point that it is the tyrannical nature of the French polity that sponsors a kind of military bathos and that Boileau lives in a state of mauvais foi not as a result of personal venality but because of the mauvais foi that attends all public jollification within an absolutist polity. In other words, Boileau is both victim of an authoritarian regime and to be commended for the extent to which he can still function at a high level within such a regime. It is both paradoxical and illuminating therefore that Boileau has translated Longinus on the sublime, which contains the following memorable passage:

There is nothing perhaps, added he, which more elevates the Souls of great Men than Liberty, nor that more powerfully excites and awakens in us that natural Sentiment which leads us to Emulation, and that glorious Ambition of seeing our selves rais’d above others: Add to this, that the Prizes which are propos’d in Common-wealths, sharpen, if I may so say, and polish the Minds of Orators, teaching them to cultivate with care the Talents they have receiv’d from Nature; insomuch, that one may see the Liberty of their Country shining forth in their Harangues.

But we, he continu’d, who from our Infancy have been taught to submit to the Yoke of lawful Rule, who have been inur’d by Custom to bend under Monarchy, while as yet our Minds were tender and capable of receiving all Impressions; in one word, we who have never tasted of that enlivening and fruitful Source of Eloquence, I mean Liberty, the highest Pitch that we can generally arrive at, is making ourselves great and egregious Flatterers. (Longinus 126)

As a loyal servant to an absolute monarch, therefore, Boileau himself cannot help but fall short of the sublime principles he translates. Part of the difference between the two panegyricists involves the question of personification. Boileau’s adult life coincided with just one monarch, whereas Prior’s rather more truncated adult life coincided with six sovereigns. It was therefore much easier for Boileau to use “Louis” and “France” as more or less interchangeable terms and to conflate the functions of serving his nation and flattering his king. Given the greater political volatility evidenced by England and Britain’s recent political experience, the relationship with power that Prior “enjoys” is inevitably of a different and more complex nature.

Prior apologized for his poetry by claiming that his hours were absorbed by public business, the business of diplomacy. The apology is of course itself, highly diplomatic. Diplomacy, far from annoyingly “interrupting” his career as a poet, defined his most successful and mature works. Prior, defined not as “poet and diplomat” but as “poet-diplomat,” is very much the product of his unusual career. Whether defined as a diplomatic poet or as a poetic diplomat, his habitual register offered a version of careful persuasion that his more aristocratic colleagues, cursed by a sense of innate entitlement, typically lacked.

A more humorous defense of the art of diplomacy is offered in the course of Prior’s “A Dialogue between the Vicar of Bray and Sir Thomas More,” part of a remarkable sequence of “Dialogues of the Dead” that went unpublished in Prior’s lifetime.

More. … A Man must do his Duty what soever may be the Event of it: in the high
Station wherein I was placed I was keeper of the Kings Conscience, how then could I possibly dispence with the Dictates of my own?

Vicar. That was a pleasant employment indeed. Keeper of a Mans Conscience who never knew his own Mind half an Hour. What could the Chancellor think should become of him; if he contradicted his Highness, who Beheaded one of his best Beloved Wives upon meer Suspition of her being false to him, and had like to have played the Same trick upon another only for attempting to Instruct him. You that used to Puzzle Us with your Greek and Latin Should have minded what Your Friend Cicero said in otio cum dignitate, but to be sure in negocio sine periculo.

More. And yet, Vicar, Cicero himself was beheaded as well as I.

Vicar. Why that is just the thing I have often taken into my consideration, he lost his Life when he forsook his Maxime, to say the Truth on’t his Case in some respect was not unlike Yours.
(Literary Works 1:642−43)

The dialogue is far from one-sided. Prior does not burlesque Sir Thomas More, but merely subjects his principled obstructionism to some refreshingly practical rejoinders. Prior’s Vicar of Bray, who survives the theological turmoil of the sixteenth century with his vicarage intact, is revealed not as a man without principle but as a man with an intelligently flexible and relational notion of public service. In many ways this dialogue reads as a prose equivalent of “The Turtle and the Sparrow” in which obsessive fidelity and relational flexibility are engaged in sprightly and inconclusive dialogue. The More-Vicar dialogue is dated (roughly) 1718−1721 by Wright and Spears, representing the experience of a man with no further political future but with considerable hopes for economic security, someone with a keen sense of what can be preserved from the turmoil of political conflict. Rippy notes that “the ambivalence of the debate resembles that of Prior the politician, who at one point votes to impeach his childhood friend in order to protect his king and himself, yet at a later point saves his old friend from the Tower at the risk of his own neck” (113). Like the inconclusive conclusion to “Alma,” Prior does not simply endorse flexibility at the expense of rigidity, but occupies an unstable point in between stability and fluidity.

Diplomacy resists closure. When diplomats speak of a “lasting peace” they are rarely duped by the misconception that any single piece of paper can determine the relations of nation states for all eternity. Diplomacy is necessarily an ongoing process. Documents need to be reinterpreted, stretched and reconceived in light of constantly shifting circumstances. Prior’s mature work, his supposedly “post-political” work is similarly resistant to closure. Prior the poet and Prior the diplomat are defined by two peace treaties—the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). The difference between these two achievements informs a decisive difference between the body of poetic work that informs the experience of these two events. The Treaty of Ryswick essentially involved dealing with one antagonist and asserting a position of confidence and military strength in respect of this antagonist. The Treaty of Utrecht was a more complex and triangulated agreement in which a far more oscillating sequence of rapprochements and estrangements was called for. Unsurprisingly, the poetry that informs the Utrecht experience is rather more interesting than the verse which informs that of Ryswick.

Prior’s poetry of war and peace has engaged rather less critical appreciation than Prior’s scenes from the sex wars. However, such diplomatic skills are transferrable. Faith Gildenhuys’ interpretation of Prior’s love lyrics concludes with a reading of his distinct amatory satisfactions that again celebrates the power of diplomatic artifice:

[I]t is in fact appropriate to see him as a part of the growing eighteenth-century interest in women as subjects rather than simply objects of male passion. His use of anacreontic and pastoral conventions is more than a nostalgic appeal to outworn fashions, as it becomes a subtle means of exploring the contradictions and limitations of the myths of masculine desire. Perhaps the fact that Prior’s best lyrics are suggestive of reciprocal relationships in love accounts for their continuing appeal. (452−53)

An appreciative feminist reading of “Prior’s best lyrics” would work on the principle that (in the time-honoured phrase) “the personal is political.” Diplomacy is inherently dialogic and therefore resistant to courtly objectification. Flattery is replaced by reciprocity.

It is unreasonable to expect any imminent renewed appreciation for Prior’s political poems of the 1690s. Indeed, all prevailing norms of critical applause prefer Tory Prior to Whig Prior, the Prior defined by an unpopular peace rather than a popular war, the nervous diplomat rather than the boisterous cheerleader. Indeed, given the widespread and convincing argument that an embedded journalist is not really a journalist, it may be popular to infer that a panegyric poet is not really a poet. The poets who enjoy pedagogic canonization are those who demonstrate some “distance” from their subjects, a distance which is perhaps incompatible with conspicuous political success.

Prior would have tactfully agreed with W.H. Auden’s over-quoted line that “poetry makes nothing happen” (142), and his agreement would have been all the more enthusiastic and eloquent at the very point when his diplomacy was busy redrawing the map of the world. Diplomacy is the ultimate example of ars celare artem since it can never claim the credit for its own accomplishments. As Welsted’s 1712 translation of Longinus observes, “there is no Figure so excellent as that which is entirely conceal’d, and which one shall not apprehend to be a Figure at all” (66). Prior’s modesty connects with the diplomatic necessity of removing the suspicion that persuasion has performed any “added value” to the supposedly natural justice of the outcome. More than any of his contemporaries, therefore, Prior enjoyed an Austinian sense of performative speech and a more focused yet occluded sense of “how to do things with words.”

Maynooth University

AFTER several decades of scholarship devoted to the recuperation of marginalized writers and texts, the issue of the eighteenth-century canon continues to vex literary scholars. For Paula R. Backscheider the position is clear:

[l]iterary movements are not made by single great poets, as the canon of Great Men implies; they are collective efforts that express a number of things – the taste of a time, the longings and aspirations of a people, the creative genius of a poet, and the feeling of individual writers. (14)

Backscheider’s statement raises two important issues. Firstly, the poetic practices of any period are complex, representing multiple poets, forms and genres. For the poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries this is a particularly apposite observation, as the century was “a miscellaneous age, when ideas of mixture entered cultural and constitutional debate,” not a period “of certainty, stasis, consensus, and restraint” (Fairer x-xi). Secondly, modern critical methodologies need to reflect this diversity in the scope of and approach to readings. Over the past few decades, this has meant a reconsideration of literary histories previously dominated by figures such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the reassessment of the need for such a concept as the canon. Consequently, the corpus of poets and texts studied and anthologized has expanded to include many long unheard poetic voices.

Few scholars would argue against these moves; however, there are several points about the reconsideration of the canon that warrant examination. Perhaps most importantly, even as the grounds of canonization have shifted with emerging theoretical approaches, the traditional canon persists as a critical frame. In other words, the recuperation of female and laboring class voices, for example, has not necessarily diminished the dominance of Dryden or Pope. This is, in part, because of modern critical biases which still privilege certain writers, genres and production contexts and, as a result, the complexity and variety of the poetry produced during the period is to an extent invisible to modern literary historians and critics (Fairer 124). In addition, the resilience of long established literary reputations is bolstered, as J. Paul Hunter explains, by our desire to construct neat literary histories and our tendency to rely on rigid periodization. Such critical habits, based as they are on boundaries and discontinuities, deal inadequately with complexity and intersection, resulting in collateral damage to the literary reputations of those writers who “fall into the cracks” between periods or categories (“Missing Years” 434−35). For Hunter the period 1690−1720 demonstrates these issues as it appears to include no notable poetic figures. Despite its “poetic plenitude,” the period represents a transitional phase of literary or poetic practice between the eras of Dryden and Pope (“Missing Years” 437). The reasons for the appearance of an empty and transitional phase in English poetic practices are numerous and complex; however, modern methodological biases and habits cannot alone explain the missing years of Hunter’s thesis. It is therefore necessary to consider other possibilities which have less to do with modern critical practices per se than with contemporary contexts which have not yet been fully explored. One key context that helps to shed light on this is that of the contemporary critical debates, which, for Robert J. Griffin, remain a frame for modern approaches to eighteenth-century poetry (378).

Paul Trolander and Zeynep Tenger provide an inclusive and useful definition of critical practices which include personal and communal responses to texts. These range from:

acts of preference, taste, or discrimination in any age that are felt and thought but never voiced (and thus can be inferred but not known), or voiced but not printed (and thus go unrecorded), to print culture of the present and past out of which critical histories are most often constructed. (40)

This broader definition of practice offers a better understanding of the connections between contemporary literary reception and the professional critical debates. More specifically for this present essay, it prompts us to examine a broader range of texts which engage not only with questions of literary taste but also with the roles of poet, critic and reader alike. Anne Finch voices her opinions on such matters quite clearly in a range of poems which form the main discussion of this essay; however in many of these poems Finch also raises the dangers of active participation in the mainstream critical debates and questions the validity of professional criticism. Critical debates were complex and influenced by political and financial motives as much as artistic shifts. Roger Lonsdale explains that

[i]t is commonly assumed that the restraints imposed by polite taste were so pervasive that it never occurred to eighteenth-century poets to write in certain ways or on certain topics. [However] the success of that taste lay less in governing what was written than in influencing what would be allowed to survive. (xxxvi-vii)

Lonsdale’s observation that contemporary critical debates had a greater impact on reputation and the longevity of both writer and text than on the type of text produced is important: it points to contemporary critical discussions as the potential cause of the longstanding occlusion of notable poetic figures from the canon that has only in recent years been addressed.

Many of the key theorists of the period had dual roles as poet and arbiter of poetic taste. This twofold position was a powerful one: it raised the poet’s profile and it mutually reinforced literary reputations, establishing a form of “self-canonization” (Hammond 4). It also strengthened the political and social relationships which were the foundation of a hierarchy of poetic practices. Dryden and Pope were perhaps the most celebrated of these poet-critics and this may account for the persistence of their reputation compared to those of equally prolific or well-regarded poets, such as Finch or Matthew Prior. Despite their dominance across literary and critical discourses, Dryden and Pope were not, of course, the sole voices in these critical debates nor were their chosen modes of discussion—the poetic essay and the preface—the only avenues open to aspiring critics. However, direct participation in critical debates was not a given, with many poets unable or unwilling to engage in what could be a fruitful but dangerous activity to emerging poets conscious of their literary reputation but keen to expand their writing career. Discussions of the canon frequently do not adequately distinguish between the success of a literary career and the enduring reputation of a writer. These are not necessarily the same thing, although the collective memory of the established canon largely collapses these differences.

Finch was a prolific and skillful poet who has received an increasing share of critical attention. However, while Finch now belongs to a newly important literary history, her poetry still suffers from what Carol Barash terms an “under-reading” based on the assumptions that women poets wrote only from their own experience and that the poetic voice used translated this directly and simplistically (English Women’s Poetry 20). However, her poems display an acute awareness of the importance of poetic theory and Finch’s engagement with critical discussions on her own terms; she draws a distinction between theory and criticism. Finch is wary of the critics who dominated the literary scene despite sharing many of their literary preoccupations and political allegiances, and her texts are, to use Michael Gavin’s phrase, “haunted by critics” (633). The poems reveal a strategic positioning by Finch of her texts, away from the direct glare of critical reception. In this article I shall examine some of her many poems that explore her complex relationship with the dominant poetic and critical debates of the period described by Hunter as the ‘missing years.’ In particular, I shall argue that Finch’s decision to distance herself from direct engagement with such critical debates contributed to her late inclusion in the canon or canons of eighteenth-century poetry. Although not the sole criterion for inclusion in the canon, contemporary literary reputation was consolidated through critical practice or what Backscheider terms poetic “agency” (22). In distancing herself from the debate, Finch may have neglected an important component in the management of her own reputation.

The self-management of literary reputation had been a key skill for emerging and celebrated writers from 1660 onwards, as they sought to distance themselves from the individuals and practices of the Civil War era (Parker 7−17). At the Restoration, “established writers hastily repositioned themselves” through selective publication and critical texts in a more general reassessment of the literary canon and poetic practices,” and by 1700 “the classical and contemporary canons were each being reshaped by a process of interaction and reciprocal criticism” (Hammond 4, 11). In “To My Lord Chancellor” (1662), Dryden exhibits a keen interest in asserting the boundaries between his own and prior literary practices not merely in the interest of political expedience:

When our great Monarch into exile went,
Wit and religion suffered banishment
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
At length the Muses stand restored again
To that great charge which nature did ordain.
(Kinsley 28, lines 17−18, 23−24)

Similarly, in his Essay on Criticism (1711) Pope is clear about the literary uses of conceit and his distance from earlier poetic practices:

Some to Conceit alone their Taste confine,
And Glitt’ring Thoughts struck out at ev’ry line;
Pleas’d with a Work where nothing’s just or fit;
One glaring Chaos and Wild Heap of Wit.
(Rogers 8, lines 289−92)

Also key to this process of canon reassessment and formation were miscellany collections published by booksellers such as Henry Herringman and Jacob Tonson: “[B]y providing a home for shorter poems and translations, and by collecting prologues, epilogues, epistles and commendatory poems, these volumes shaped a literary world of mutual obligations and defined a canon of contemporary writers” (Hammond 6, 8). In the increasingly commercial medium of print culture, the management of a literary career was financially useful and potentially easier. Dryden, for example, made such strategic use of miscellany publication through his collaboration with Tonson (Hammond 14; Tomlinson 11). In both print and scribal forms, the miscellany was, for Barbara Benedict, especially important in establishing literary reputations at a time when writing was gradually becoming a paid profession (68, 63). Moreover, the growing power of the publisher and the declining influence of the bookseller led to the phenomenon of the fixed catalogue; this not only allowed increased sales but was crucial to the maintenance of a literary reputation and, in the long term, helped to form a lasting canon.

The careful presentation of one’s own work was very important in a full and increasingly competitive literary scene. All poets needed to define their own work in contradistinction to that of a largely homogenous field of writers. This need not only relate to financial and social pressures, but in a political situation that was increasingly predicated on a two party system, the need to be associated clearly with one side could be both very beneficial and dangerous. As a result, the critical rhetoric shared many similarities with political debates, not least its oppositional dynamic. Indeed, Backscheider and Ingrassia assert that “the kinds of poetry an individual read functioned as a marker of political allegiance, degree of sensibility, and intellect; poetic taste became another cultural code” (xxiii). Although this does not necessarily reflect the realities of political allegiance or of poetic practice, this dynamic, “the aesthetic of party,” has been identified by Abigail Williams as a contributory factor in the disappearance of Whig writers from both the academic and general canon for the early eighteenth century. These rhetorical strategies and structures of Whig cultural politics are characterized by what Stephen Zwicker terms the “politics of contest” (7). This is remembered most clearly in the derogation of Whig writers as hacks and dunces by key Tory writers such as Dryden and Pope (Williams 22−25). However, as Williams points out, “the distinctions between high and low culture that seem so central to the construction of [this] Tory myth are far less stable than they seem and mask the common ground which is shared by many writers of the first few decades of the eighteenth century” (32). In a further qualification of the notion of politically bipolar poetics, Christine Gerrard notes that “[r]ecent 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” (2). One consequence of the binary dynamic promoted by party political interest was the occlusion of other participants in the debate—in Williams’ argument a generation of Whig writers. However, political allegiance cannot always be neatly mapped onto poetic theory and although Williams argues for a political context to the diminished reputation of Whig writers, the actual position is more complicated with writers such as Finch similarly marginalized by other equally important factors.

During the political chaos of the 1670s, in addition to distancing himself from earlier poetic practices, Dryden focused in numerous texts on the function and nature of poetry and yet, as Kyle Pivetti observes, his ideas on poetry remained constant across his career (86−87). Dryden was conscious of a “sense of the judiciousness required by classical art,” literary judgment which could accommodate difference and which was not associated with pedantry (Myers 74). However, as his preface to Sylvae (1685) makes clear, criticism was not necessarily associated with poetic discrimination:

There are a sort of blundering half-witted people, who make a great deal of noise about a Verbal slip; though Horace wou’d instruct them better in true Criticism…True judgment in Poetry, like that in Painting, takes a view of the whole together, whether it be good or not; and where the beauties are more than the Faults, concludes for the Poet against the little Judge. (n. pag.)

Dryden’s dismissal of “the little Judge” can be seen in his own efforts to offer constructive feedback to protégés such as William Walsh (Tomlinson 4; Ades 265−67). It also acknowledges the aggressive nature of much contemporary criticism:

’tis a sign that malice is hard driven, when ’tis forc’d to lay hold on a Word or Syllable; to arraign a Man is one thing, and to cavil at him is another. In the midst of an ill natur’d Generation of Scriblers, there is always Justice enough left in Mankind, to protect good Writers: And they too are oblig’d, both by humanity and interest, to espouse each others cause, against false Criticks, who are the common Enemies. (Preface, Sylvae n. pag.)

Dryden was acutely aware of the confrontational nature of criticism: in a letter to John Dennis in 1694 he writes that “we poor Poets Militant (to use Mr Cowley’s Expression) are at the mercy of Wretched Scribblers and when they cannot fasten upon our verses, they fall upon out morals, our Principles of State and religion” (qtd. in Ades 269). The link between critical and political debate is clear here and for Dryden it is evident in both form and content. He is also clearly aware of the dangers this posed for his and other poets’ reputations. However, like Pope after him, Dryden could also engage in ad hominem attacks: his MacFlecknoe (1682) was designed to ruin the reputation and career of his rival Thomas Shadwell and, in the process, establish Dryden’s own reputation more firmly.

Despite Pope’s claims to the contrary in a letter to Caryll in July 1719, Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) attracted a significant amount of contemporary attention, not least from co-religionists who found certain passages heterodox and, more famously, from Dennis (Audra and Williams 203−5). Dennis’s response was to accuse Pope of “servile Deference” to the Ancients. While, as Seth Rudy points out, Pope undoubtedly saw himself as “the scion of a literary bloodline that extended straight back to his revered ancients” (4), Pope reveals in the essay that his relationship to classical antecedents was, like Dryden’s, not deferential but a far more active engagement with the key ideas of classical literature:

Some on the leaves of ancient authors prey,
Nor time nor moths e’er spoil’d so much as they.
Some drily plain, without invention’s aid,
Write dull receipts how poems may be made.
These leave the sense, their learning to display,
And those explain the meaning quite away. (Rogers 3-4, lines 112−17)

Indeed, as Audra and Williams point out, Dennis and Pope shared many ideas about literature and the role of criticism, and any argument between the two men seems likely to stem from religious and political differences as much as literary matters (206). However, Dennis had long been an object of ridicule amongst the wits and had in 1702 identified himself clearly with the critics rather than the wits. In the initial allusion to Dennis, Pope may have been responding merely to Dennis as indicative of problematic critical behaviour (Audra and Williams 207). Whatever the exact cause of the argument, its effect was to ruin Dennis’s contemporary reputation (Nokes 29). Despite clearly distinguishing between the need for literary taste and the perils of criticism, both Dryden and Pope engaged in its most aggressive forms, hampering the career and consequent reputations of fellow writers. For their contemporaries, such as Finch, it was perhaps a salutary lesson.

Finch is with some justification the best-known of all female poets of the early modern period (Barash, English Women’s Poetry 259; Ezell 127−29). Her poetry was well regarded in her lifetime and she “enjoyed the friendship of major contemporaries, such as Pope, throughout her productive career as a poet” (McGovern and Hinnant xv). As a result, the scholarship on Finch is far more substantial than that on the majority of her contemporaries. However, the degree of contemporary critical acclaim was not matched by the extent of the publication of her work or by a sustained literary reputation. There was no collected edition of her poetry issued between her death in 1720 and the publication of Myra Reynold’s edition in 1903. This, as Hunter’s discussion expounds, partially explains her limited presence in critical accounts of the period. Although several of Finch’s poems did appear in published miscellanies, she increasingly withdrew from this mode of circulation and focused her attention on her published collection Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions (1713). This volume was published in a particularly propitious political climate for Finch; however, as it receded after the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715, she continued to write and circulate her poetry within a coterie context and more informally in letters (Gavin 649; McGovern 91). Throughout her writing life, Finch relied on the support of a community which shared certain values: loyalty to the Stuart monarchy, Tory political sympathies, and High Church Anglicanism. For Barash, this “politically oppositional community of pro-Stuart women” in the tradition of the femme forte is central to Finch’s work (“Political Origins” 346). However, this thriving culture is not exclusively female, as an examination of the extensive body of manuscript verse attests: many of her poems are addressed to male relatives, friends or literary contemporaries. Furthermore, Finch does not avoid “polemical arguments on behalf of women’s equality” or fail to “defend the rights of women to inhabit the then almost exclusively masculine republic of letters,” as Barbara McGovern and Charles Hinnant claim (xxxii). In fact, many of the poems engage directly with critical debates and her role as a poet in these discussions. Finch’s stance is, however, different from that of Dryden and Pope and many of her male contemporaries.

Finch as a writer, whose political affiliations caused her personal, financial and career problems, was perhaps understandably wary of debates which could ruin her literary reputation, despite her prestigious and well-connected circle of friends. That she is a female writer probably adds to this caution, but is not, I suggest, its primary cause. As with other discussions concerning women’s writing, we need to exercise great care in laying a grid of gender across this poetic debate, as many women, including Finch, were more concerned with political and literary matters than gender relations. As with so many things, Finch showed a loyalty to older poetic forms and conventions. The relationship between political and literary production observed by Dryden underlines her support for a literary and political network which functioned along older and coterie lines. Despite the fact that after 1712 Finch’s personal position improved—Heneage Finch inherited the family estate at Eastwell and she published Miscellany Poems in 1713—she remained a selective publisher of her own work. Many more pieces remained in manuscript at her death in 1720; yet not all of these texts were early or unfinished pieces but poems of her mature career.

Finch was well aware of both the benefits and dangers of participating in the on-going debate about the function and nature of poetry. In fact, she was, like many female writers, wary of the critics regardless of her own participation in the discussion. Despite her reticence to engage publicly in criticism as either a reader or a poet, Finch invested in the same broad discussion as her peers. The bulk of Finch’s texts which engage with criticism were left in manuscript form at her death (Gavin 633). This was presumably in part to avoid controversy, either as a non-juror during her early career or in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 and the consequent hostile political environment for those, such as Finch, who remained loyal to the Stuarts. As a result, the nature of her critical engagement with post-1688 poetic culture has largely gone unremarked (Gavin 634). However, as “Mercury and the Elephant. A Prefatory Fable” shows, Finch not only had clear views on the state of critical debate, she also offered an alternative that avoided the petty rivalries magnified by political or financial concerns (Reynolds 3−4). Finch was a powerful advocate of writing “with studious care” and to “agreed upon standards of good composition” (Gavin 638). This is visible in her preface to a manuscript collection from the early 1700s (Reynolds 6−12):

I am besides sensible, that Poetry has been of late so explain’d, the laws of itt being putt into familiar languages that even those of my sex (if they will be so presumptuous as to write) are very accountable for their transgressions against them. For what rule of Aristotle or Horace is there, that has not been given us by Rapin, Despreaux, D’acier, my Lord Roscomon etc.? What has Mr. Dryden omitted that may lay open the very misteries of this Art? And can there any where be found a more delightsome, or more usefull piece of poetry, then that, ‘correct essay, / Which so repairs, our old Horatian way’ If then, after the perusal of these, we fail, we cannot plead any want, but of capacity, or care. (9−10)

As she does in “Mercury and the Elephant,” Finch is at pains to separate out two distinct strands of criticism to which she is subject in this preface: that she is a female writer and that she is a bad writer. She dismisses the first out of hand as she does in the poem itself, but she is willing to submit herself to the latter (Gavin 638). Indeed, she welcomes the theorizing of Dryden and his fellow critics of the late seventeenth century as a new and accessible scale of merit which should be used to scrutinize all poets.

In “The Introduction,” Finch makes clear her views on appropriate forms of criticism:

Did I, my lines intend for publick view,
How many censures, wou’d their faults persue,
Some wou’d, because such words they do affect,
Cry they’re insipid, empty, uncorrect. (Reynolds 4, lines 1−4)

While this poem is a counter to those who argued that female writers were at best ill-advised and at worst a dangerous example to others, it amply demonstrates Finch’s own poetic skill. It also tells us much about Finch’s and contemporary opinion about the critical debates. The poem continues by making a distinction between criticism, true judgment and public opinion:

And many, have attain’d, dull and untaught
The name of Witt, only by finding fault.
True judges, might condemn their want of witt,
And all might say, they’re by a Woman writ. (lines 5−8)

The concerns of gender she assigns to—and dismisses—as public opinion. The critic is characterized as ignorant and self-serving, whilst those with true judgment offer what we might now call constructive feedback. It is revealing that Finch does not see the opposition as between critic and wit, which customarily structures the critical debates of the period. Instead, she flattens this distinction to present a more complex picture of not only the critical debates but also the reception of texts beyond this small urban clique.

Elsewhere, Finch distinguishes between past and present uses of wit, identifying the reign of Charles II as an era when wit was prized. In “The Tale of the Miser and the Poet,” Finch introduces a miser who explains:

I hid this Coin, when Charles was swaying;
When all was Riot, Masking, Playing;
When witty Beggars were in fashion,
And Learning had o’er-run the nation. (Reynolds 192, lines 31−34)

The miser, a reflection of an increasingly marketized literary economy, however, can now dig up his coin. It is a time when “Mankind is so much wiser, / That none is valued like the Miser (lines 35−36). In contrast, the fortunes of the poet are waning and now it is the poet who must bury his treasure:

Till Time, which hastily advances,
And gives all new Turns and Chances,
Again may bring it into use;
Roscommons may again produce;
New Augustean Days revive,
When Wit shall please, and Poets thrive. (Reynolds 193−94, lines 94−99)

Part of Finch’s broader critique of society, “The Tale of the Miser and the Poet” challenges the commercial literary world, in which “Fights and Fav’rite Friends” are the norm. The poet asks the miser:

                                     can you raise,
As well as Plumb-trees, Groves of Bays?
Where you, which I wou’d chuse much rather,
May Fruits of Reputation gather?
Will Man of Quality, and Spirit,
Regard you for intrinsick Merit?
And seek you out, before your Betters,
For Conversation, Wit and Letters? (Reynolds 192, lines 41−48)

The miser cannot offer the poet any reassurance; literary reputation is now decided by favor, partiality and market forces in contrast to an older model of coterie circulation and collaboration.

For Finch the difference between poetic theory and trivial criticism is clear: the guidelines offered by Dryden are descriptive rather than prescriptive and contrary to much critical debate should not be played out in public or in the ad hominem fashion of the most celebrated disagreements. Indeed, as Sitter notes, most poets of the period felt the rules to be less prescriptive or rigid than the contemporary commentary would suggest (134). Yet, as Gavin observes, “[f]or Finch, criticism is not the best employment for a poet’s acumen, a significant point of departure for someone who venerated Dryden and would later befriend Alexander Pope” (639−40). Dryden is clearly valued by Finch for his work on theorizing poetic practice and his mentorship of numerous poets. Pope, too, was valued as a literary peer. Despite this encomium, Finch, unlike Dryden and Pope, did not engage in the self-promotion through strategic publication and overt participation in critical discussions. She refused to provide a preface to her 1713 Miscellany Poems, replacing it with “Mercury and the Elephant,” which offers a critique of the preface as a weapon of critical conflict. Although it works in the same way, the position of Finch is clear: not only should all right-thinking poets beware the barbarian critics and the commercial market they underwrite, but poets should not encourage this sterile debate by their own participation, even if politically or financially expedient.

In its place Finch suggests an informed, constructive but ultimately private readership. We glimpse Finch’s ideal reader at various points of her work: the epistolary network witnessed by the poems in the Wellesley manuscript; the friends mentioned in the manuscript preface and “Mercury and the Elephant,” and her evaluation of fellow poets such as Dryden and Roscommon. She contrasts this to a literary scene which is urban, cruel and trivial. Although she argues against a financial imperative to writing, her stance is perhaps more accurately a promotion of coterie practices rather than an attack on the literary market—a comment on the difference of critical modes rather than a detailed observation on the marketization of publication. By distancing herself from the market of public opinion as well as the market of literary publication, she acknowledges in “To a Fellow Scribbler,” that all literary careers end and that ultimately reputation is ephemeral and deceptive, a “False appearance”: “Grotesque and trivial shun’d by all, / And soon forgotten when we fall (Reynolds 106, lines 32−33). Coterie circulation includes rather than rejects critical discourses but was felt by Finch to be more constructive and less arbitrary than mainstream published criticism that was led by the dual forces of money and fashion. In “To Mr Prior from a Lady Unknown,” we get a sense of what, for Finch, the literary coterie can offer in its place:

In either sex You never fail, we find,
To cultivate the heart, or charm the mind,
In raptures lost. I fear not your disdain,
But own I languish to possess your vein.
As a fond bird, pleas’d with the teacher’s note,
Expends his life to raise his mimic throat,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Such is my verse, with equal zeal I burn,
Too happy, shou’d I meet the same return. (Reynolds 102, lines 9−14, 20−1)

Crucial too for Finch is self-discrimination, as she explains in “To Mr Pope”: “’Tis not from friends that write, or foes that read; / Censure or praise from ourselves must proceed” (Reynolds 104−5, lines 42−43).

Finch again addresses the distinctions between true judgment and professional criticism in “Mercury and The Elephant.” Gavin explains that Finch punctures the pride of the elephant, victorious in war over the boar and yet whose fame is rightly seen as illusory or trivial by Mercury (650). This petty conflict is, like contemporary critical argument, characterized by “foul Play” and “twenty-thousand Scandals” (Reynolds 3, lines 16, 22), yet presented as momentous by the self-aggrandizing participants. Finch’s voice then intercedes as she makes clear the parallel between this unedifying and violent account and the mauling frequently given by the critics or rival poets. She continues:

Tis for themselves, not us, they Read;
Whilst that proceeding to requite,
We own (who in the Muse delight)
’Tis for our Selves, not them we Write. (Reynolds 4, lines 41−44)

The critic here is both professional and self-serving. Her answer is to “fix our scatter’d Papers” away from this corrupting debate, which she explicitly links to a commercial press: “Tho’ whilst our Labours are preserv’d,/ The Printers may, indeed, be starv’d” (Reynolds 4, lines 49−50). Finch does gender the distinction here. It is the male critical audience which is derogated and Charles Hinnant sees this poem as expressing an acute awareness of the hostility of a male-dominated literary market and suggests that gender is a main focus here (76). Gavin goes further, explaining that: “Finch imagines this hypercritical readership as an always present spectre of male disapproval” and she uses this threat as justification for not publishing more widely (633). Perhaps more persuasive is Backscheider’s reading of the poem which identifies Finch’s rejection of the reading public, despite expecting and wanting an audience for her work (59). This audience was, for Finch, an elite and influential network of male and female friends that represented a targeted and significant audience for her ideas and texts. Finch also saw this coterie as a refuge from various forms of conflict, an idea she explores further in “The Critick and the Writer of Fables” (Reynolds 153−55).

“The Critick and The Writer of Fables” is ostensibly a discussion of the hierarchy of poetic genres. It is written skillfully in the mode of the genre raised and then rejected. Her first target is epic and she uses the Trojan War as her point of discussion. She then maintains the same martial theme across the poetic discussion of genre, and both the epic and satire sections focus on the siege of Troy. However, it is not merely the genres of epic and satire which are to be regarded as “old Bombast” (Reynolds 154, line 28) but the critical debate itself. The critic paradoxically argues that the writer of fables “seeks to purchase Fame by childish Tales” (Reynolds 153, line 13); yet for Finch it is the critic who at a cost to others’ reputations, buys fame with petty and pedantic argument. We know from the other poems that Finch associates the petty rivalries of critical debate with an increasingly marketized literary economy, but here Finch’s poet is “easily persuaded” (Reynolds 154, line 15), gullible and unaware of either the ill-founded judgments or cruel comments of many critics. Finch, like Dryden and Pope, argued for the ethical dimension of poetry:

Whilst aery Fictions hastily repair
To fill my Page, and rid my Thoughts of Care.
As they to Birds and Beasts new Gifts impart,
And Teach, as Poets shou’d, whilst they Divert. (Reynolds 153, lines 5−8)

There is certainly a clear polemical strand to her texts, for all that they are imbricated in polite coterie culture. The poem is a lesson, not necessarily for Finch herself but for her peers swayed by fashion and financial considerations.

The choice of the siege of Troy is significant. In her broader challenge to contemporary critical rhetoric, the passages suggesting violence and conflict reflect her opinions on the aggressive nature of contemporary critical practice expressed in “Mercury and the Elephant” and “To a Fellow Scribbler.” However, in the final passage, where Finch’s own voice emerges, she presents Troy as London, besieged by a trivial and violent critical discourse which demands not only a restricted range of literary genres but requires all to engage in a cruel but futile conflict. This besieged community relies on satire as a “single Stream” supplying its needs and keeping its “Fancies warm” (Reynolds 155, lines 51, 55). Finch’s poetic voice wonders at the rejection of “so many choice Productions” available to the poet and reader, “[a]s if you’d in the midst of Plenty starve” (Reynolds 155, lines 54, 57). By implication, this stream is not only insufficient, but stagnant and potentially corrupting. Gavin notes that Finch felt “bad poets catered to an ill-natured urban readership, that critics valued nothing but back-biting satire, and that these two factors engendered a culture of mutually assured detraction” (644). Important here is the distinction Finch lays bare between the bad or ill-advised poet and the sensible poet who writes only with regard to the twin aims of instruction and entertainment. This offers a parallel between the witty self-serving critic focused solely on fashion or trend and the constructive evaluation or intellectual theorizing of poetic practice that belongs to an earlier age or to an alternative literary community such as the one Finch enjoyed. Her poetry often expresses an awareness of both the dangers of criticism and the need for high poetic standards to which all writers should be accountable. For all her wariness, “Mercury and the Elephant” and “The Critick and the Writer of Fables” were included in Miscellany Poems; however, ultimately, Finch’s strategic withdrawal from the more public aspects of critical debates meant that, despite a contemporary readership of influential friends and family, her texts were quickly lost to a wider readership after her death.

Writing two decades before his article on the apparently missing poets and texts of 1690−1720, Hunter was clear that

Even though our criteria for analysis of literature have changed considerably and change more with every passing years, we seem not to have altered substantially our view of what [is] most distinctive, original, valuable, and lasting in writers we put in—or leave out—of our syllabi. (38-39)

Regardless of concerted efforts, the poetic canon and the critical account of poetic practices between 1690 and1720 are still partially obscured and skewed by several things. Modern critical and methodological biases continue to favor not only male authors but publication modes, genres and forms associated with privileged or more vocal writers active during period. The canon of great writers seems particularly resistant to challenge, as contemporary cultural reputations were influenced by several mutually reinforcing factors: the literary (self)promotion of the emerging marketized publication industry, the political debates that underpinned social, political and literary patronage and, most importantly, a professionalized critical practice. For poets such as Dryden and Pope, this debate was vital to their cultural reputation and financial security, despite misgivings about its confrontational and unedifying aspects. For others such as Finch, criticism as practiced by her contemporaries was a dangerous rhetoric which contaminated literary practice and deflected it away from its main objectives to give pleasure and offer instruction.

Dryden, Pope and other late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century theorists operated in a conflicted field; however, the impetus of most writers was not division but a form of critical synthesis of which Pope’s Essay is perhaps the clearest example (Audra and Williams 209). In reality the development of neoclassical ideas in poetry was a long and complicated project which blurs the boundaries between the artificial constructs of “The Age of Dryden” and “The Age of Pope.” Pope writes in An Essay on Criticism:

Some foreign Writers, some our own despise;
The Ancients only, or the Moderns prize:
(Thus Wit, like Faith, by each Man is apply’d
To one small sect, and All are damn’d beside.)
Meanly they seek the Blessing to confine,
And force that Sun but on a Part to Shine;
Which not alone the Southern Wit sublimes,
But ripens Spirits in cold Northern Climes;
Which from the first has shone on Ages past,
Enlights the present, and shall warm the last. (lines 394−403)

As such, many of Pope’s statements about the form and content of poetry are, like Dryden’s before him, similar to those of his contemporaries, including Finch; however, his need to manage a career may account for the emphasis on oppositional critical discussion. Controversy not only ensures sales, it can also cement a reputation. Yet, not all poets engaged in direct and confrontational debate; Finch rejected the binary logic of such discussions and evolved a far more nuanced critical stance as several of her poems demonstrate. Ultimately, this critical reticence may have meant her poetry was not as visible to later generations of readers, despite a contemporary reputation which was the match of many.

University of Worcester