The lyric poetry of the mid eighteenth century has traditionally been hard to locate in literary history as anything other than transitional, as ‘post-Augustan’ or ‘pre-Romantic’, as decline or anticipation. It has struggled to establish a critical vocabulary in which it can be judged on its own terms. Pinned between the canonical achievements of Dryden-Pope on the one side and Wordsworth-Coleridge on the other, this poetry has often been used to further other agendas, to play a ‘minor’ role in reinforcing ‘major’ achievements, or to exemplify an individual eccentricity. But such tired ‘survey course’ arguments have now begun to look very limited. The old categories need to be set aside, and these poets be allowed to set their own agenda. The challenge is to find critical perspectives that will do justice to them as individual poets while acknowledging their contemporaneity and suggesting lines of connection between them. It should also be possible, through them, to question some of the traditional criteria for literary judgment. These two trajectories will help to guide the discussion that follows.

Thomas Gray (1716–71), William Collins (1721–59), the Warton brothers, Thomas (1728–90) and Joseph (1722–1800), Christopher Smart (1722–71), James Macpherson (1736–96), Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) and Robert Burns (1759–96) offer as wide a range of voices as any group of poets in history; but there are ways in which they can gain from being discussed together. To take one extreme example: the lyric lamentations of Macpherson’s Ossian, the third-century bard who sings in his melancholy rhythmical prose of fallen heroes and a doomed race, could not be more different from Burns’s catchy rhymes, satirically edged and interspersed with responsive tavern laughter or drawing-room applause. Yet each is capturing a mood and is conscious of projecting an expressive, strongly characterised voice that carries the poem so as to reach the heart of the listener. Both are in their very different ways, lyric performances.

In narratives of English literary history Pope has tended to be seen as a figure of discontinuity rather than one who finds his natural place in the native tradition. By the end of the eighteenth century, Milton was the acknowledged heir to the poetic inheritance of the age of Shakespeare and Spenser, while Pope represented the triumph of neoclassical refinement after an earlier “barbarity.” In many ways this took Pope at his own valuation: he accepted the prevailing view that the achievement of the Elizabethans was marred by incorrectness, faulty versification and lapses of taste, and that only with Waller, Dryden, and Addison had the English language reached perfection. There certainly could be no return to styles of the past or to an obsolete English. The very title of Pope's The Fourth Satire of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, Versifyed assumes that Donne's poem cannot claim to be “verse” at all. Unlike the ancient writers or those of the Restoration, Elizabethan poets were not his stylistic models, and we look in vain for any acknowledgment, public or private, of the scale of his indebtedness to them.

But a stylistic influence (Waller, say) might be worn more lightly than one that fills the imagination. In his youth Pope read Elizabethan poets, along with much else, during his “great reading period” before the age of twenty-one (Anecdotes, i, p. 20). He read The Faerie Queene at “about twelve” and throughout his life he loved Spenser, for all his obsoleteness of language; later as a translator of Homer he recognised in George Chapman's old version, in spite of its stylistic “Fustian,” “a daring fiery Spirit that animates his Translation” (Anecdotes, i, p. 182; Prose, i, pp. 250-1). Animation in its various meanings is a characteristic feature of Pope's writings at those moments when he is drawing on Elizabethan materials.

Thomas Parnell's lines about the pastoral world take us to the heart of an age-old problem. ‘Oft have I read’, he begins, ‘that Innocence retreats / Where cooling streams salute the summer Seats; / Singing at ease she roves the field of flowers / Or safe with shepherds lies among the bowers …’ Having passed through a country fair, however, he had found ‘No Strephon nor Dorinda’, but a motley crew of randy, idle and drunken rustics:

Where is pastoral innocence to be found? And how can any modern writer not view Arcadia ironically? By a shift of focus typical of early eighteenth-century satire, the sheep move centre-stage: the incidentals of pastoral become the guardians of its soul. The poet is self-consciously listening to his own bland rhetoric (‘the Virtues which adorn the plain’, etc.) before the final rueful comment emerges – conclusive, yet almost in parenthesis, as if he is turning away from the scene. After two thousand years of pastoral poetry Parnell (d. 1718) can find only one unsullied image remaining, and there seems no more to be said.

During the middle years of the eighteenth century there was a fruitful intimacy between English poetry and what we now think of as “literary history.” Earlier poets had been conscious of their illustrious predecessors among whom they hoped to find a place, and in that sense the idea of a poetic canon is a very old one. Chaucer's position as the “Father” of English poetry had long been a commonplace, and by 1700 Spenser and Milton were seen as completing a classic pantheon of great writers, with Dryden clearly in contention. Pope's remark to Joseph Spence in 1736 was offered as a truism: “'Tis easy to mark out the general course of our poetry. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden are the great landmarks for it.” But of those “landmarks” Chaucer was virtually unread in the original, and Spenser very little. Their status as canonical English classics was based on reputation rather than reading; their language was generally regarded as outdated and even barbarous, and when being subjected to parody, imitation, or modernization, it was their distance from the present that was being exploited.

The eighteenth-century sentimentalist was expected to be a skilled interpreter of nonverbal communication. Sensitive to the nuances of facial expression or physical gesture, the ‘man of feeling’ was an expert reader of physiognomy, a translator of signs who could turn a look into a sentence, the slightest movement into an assertion, a question, or an invitation:

At especially sentimental moments Laurence Sterne's narrators translate a character's eloquent gestures for us, whether it is Yorick exchanging silent courtesies with the old French officer in the box at the Opéra Comique (‘the French officer might as well have said it all aloud’, p. 171), or the concupiscible Widow Wadman waiting for Uncle Toby to reveal where he received his war wound:

This kind of sentimental translation has been well analysed by John Mullan, who notes how sentimental narrative ‘has to translate, has to make “plain words” mediate the natural articulacy of feeling’, and in so doing establishes a sociable relationship between narrator and reader (‘those who are to benefit by the habit and art of his translation’).

My concern in this essay is to look behind the difficulties of sentimental translation to what I take to be an underlying problem—one that remains crucial for eighteenth-century notions of Sensibility.