Samuel Johnson's preeminence rests upon the extraordinary intellectual and moral achievements within his prose. That truth universally acknowledged nonetheless admits a complementary truth - Johnson is a great prose writer in part because he is a great poet. Johnson wrote poetry throughout his life. Even after a stroke and, later, upon his deathbed he turned to prayer in Latin verse. He wrote a blank-verse tragedy, translations, adaptations of classical poems, satires, love poems, poems warning of the dangers of love, elegies, epitaphs, comic parodies, serious prayers, odes, sonnets, meditations on his inner psychological and spiritual being, and, in the nature of things, poems that combined several of these genres. Johnson correctly said that at Pembroke College, Oxford his group of student-poets was a “nest of singing birds” (Life, I, 75). However naturally artful, Johnson's poetic production is small in comparison with other great poets, but several of his poems nonetheless are major and minor masterpieces. They include many devices that make his prose memorable, for his prose is memorable in part because it is so poetic. I begin this chapter by exploring some of his characteristic modes of proceeding.