Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The landscape of eighteenth-century poetry has changed dramatically over recent decades. In the late 1970s it was not uncommon for undergraduates to advance week by week through a course represented, typically, by Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Johnson. Many students at that time — myself included — found something antipathetic in an “Augustan” canon that seemed overwhelmingly male, metropolitan, neoclassical, and conservative. Yet already there were hints of alternative perspectives. Charles Peake's evocatively titled anthology Poetry of the Landscape and the Night (1967) offered a glimpse of a different kind of eighteenth-century poetry — meditative, melancholic, descriptive, and subjective — while Pat Rogers's Grub Street (1972) reconstructed a refreshingly vulgar and material counter-culture to correctness and couplets. Views multiplied further in the 1980s, when the New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989), the fruits of Roger Lonsdale's inexhaustible efforts to recover from oblivion forgotten poetic voices — the voices of laborers, dissenters, provincial writers, and, most importantly, women — powerfully reinforced a growing awareness of the plurality and diversity of eighteenth-century poetic culture. The second of these anthologies showed for the first time the range and variety of poetry written by women during this period: ... log in or subscribe to read full text