If the history of political thought is, as John Pocock argues, a ‘history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on’, Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry has a very good claim to be read as a part of that history. This is not simply to state the obvious point that the poetry of this period was intensely engaged with politics, nor even to settle for the claim that political ideas were given complex imaginative embodiment in the medium of poetry. It is, rather, to assign a role to poetry in the generation and elaboration of political concepts as part of a sustained conversation with political thought conducted in other forms of writing, such as treatises, dialogues, parliamentary speeches and pamphlets. I would like to argue that this inter-generic conversation constitutes the broader frame of discourse within which eighteenth-century political thought developed, and that it becomes more fully intelligible if one attends to the contribution of poetry. Historians of political thought are fully accustomed to approaching Milton in this way, but subsequent (and often earlier) poets are more usually analysed in terms of political allusion – a second-order kind of political thought – or of their instigation or unconscious reflection of dominant ideologies. The argument here is that early-modern literature was one domain within which political ideas – as they related to party politics, but still more to abstract, overarching questions – were meaningfully contested and transformed; and that poetry, in particular, provides something more than an enlargement of the evidence for the historical ‘terms of the discourse’ of political thought, and yet, also, something more decisive in its impact than a dramatization of politics.