Esther Greenwood, the twenty-year-old narrator of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, was studying literature in the 1950s, but her assumptions remain common in some quarters today:

I hope this book will help readers overcome the barriers – ranging from Romantic and Modern myths to inexperience – that often dull our senses to eighteenth-century poetry. Early chapters aim to test and sharpen our hearing as readers; several of the later ones focus on vision. Along the way it should become clearer, to take the young Esther Greenwood’s preconceptions individually, that the period’s poets included many women as well as men, that they were no more smug on average than poets of other eras, that what complacency they harbored was not due to a confidence in reason (which they mostly distrusted), that they wrote blank verse, odes, and various other stanzaic forms as well as rhymed couplets, and that the couplets they did write were not automatically “little,” often aspiring instead, like the late twentieth-century poet A. R. Ammons, toward a versification capable of the “sweet ingestion” of nearly anything, a poetry “multiple and embracing.”

The term “satiric poetry” seems preferable to “verse satire” as a general rubric for the major poetic satires of the eighteenth century because “verse” now usually implies something less than genuine poetry, as in “light verse.” That latter category will hardly contain poems such as Dryden’s MacFlecknoe or Absalom and Achitophel, most of Pope’s work, Johnson’s London and Vanity of Human Wishes, and several others to be considered here. “Satiric poetry” challenges the suggestion that poetry and satire are mutually exclusive and insists on the status of the works as poems, on the same model as “elegiac poetry” or “lyric poetry.” By doing so we can best approach our subject as a kind of poetry – appreciating it fundamentally as poetry that shares many of the resources of other kinds of eighteenth-century poetry – rather than as satire that happens to have been poured into a poetic mold. Satiric poetry is most usefully seen as part of a poetic continuum.

Enough of the period’s most interesting poems take the form of satire to call for sustained attention to this poetic variety and for at least a working definition of satire as we proceed. Of the scores of books on satire, one of the few to offer a concise definition is Swift and the Satirist’s Art by Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr., and it seems to me the most satisfactory: “satire consists of an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars.” Somewhat surprisingly, Rosenheim does not include the word “comic,” which quickly comes to mind in thinking of many satires. But in his view, the element of “manifest fiction” – that is, fiction meant to be recognized as such – differentiates satiric works from straightforward attacks, just as the inclusion of “historic particulars” differentiates satires from criticism of universal human limitations. Rosenheim posits a “satiric spectrum,” recognizing the large differences in tone, for example, between mild “persuasive” satires and harsh “punitive” ones. We might also recognize that some works lean more heavily on particulars than others (Pope’s Dunciad compared to Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes, for example), and that the fictional element might be a full-blown narrative or merely conspicuous exaggeration.

“Voice” is the most elemental and elusive part of poetry. Hearing a poem’s voice, or voices, is essential to experiencing it as a poem, but saying exactly what we mean by that is difficult. In one sense, “voice” is a metaphor, since black letters on a white page are literally silent. And yet the concept of voice in poetry seems far more than figurative because a poem that remains inaudible also remains inaccessible. Voice, as Christopher Smart’s line suggests, is where the poem’s mentality and physicality join.

One of the most influential early readings of an eighteenth-century poem appears in Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and it shows the challenge of paying adequate attention to poetic voice. Hearing a poem fully is an act of sympathetic imagination, not simply intelligence. Wordsworth was an astute critic as well as a great poet, but his reading of Thomas Gray’s Sonnet on the Death of Richard West is a misreading, the sort of partial portrait ambitious young poets often need to create of their predecessors. Wordsworth uses Gray’s sonnet (1742, published 1775) to illustrate what he regarded as the lamentable “poetic diction” that had infected poetry over the past century. We will take up the question of diction elsewhere in this book. Pertinent here is Wordsworth’s view of his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads as an experiment in liberating poetry from eighteenth-century phrasing. He quotes Gray’s sonnet in full and insists that only five lines, which he put in italics, possess “any value,” supposedly because they use the direct language of prose:

1. In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,

2. And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:

3. The birds in vain their amorous descant join,

4. Or cheerful fields resume their green attire:

5. These ears, alas! for other notes repine,

6. A different object do these eyes require.

7. My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;

8. And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.

9. Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,

10. And new-born pleasure brings to happier men:

11. The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;

12. To warm their little loves the birds complain.

13. I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,

14. And weep the more because I weep in vain.

Many eighteenth-century poems are not only social but also sociological. This claim requires illustration, and specification. Modern sociologists would not be convinced by this chapter that their discipline begins with eighteenth-century poets rather than nineteenth-century historians and philosophers, and lovers of poetry may not feel their pulses quicken at the thought of poetic sociology, a phrase that sounds oxymoronic. To any social scientists who have happened upon this chapter and to students of poetry, let me say at once that I do not make scientific claims for Pope, Goldsmith, or other poets of the century. Instead, what follows will focus on eighteenth-century poets’ distinctive fascination with the “prospect of society” as a subject for poetry. This phrase comes from the subtitle of Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller (1764), but it could be the subtitle or title of his more famous poem, The Deserted Village (1770) – and of many other works, ranging from major poems such as Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1714) and the third epistle of An Essay on Man (“Of the State of Man with respect to Society”), Thomson’s Castle of Indolence (1748), Crabbe’s The Village (1783), and Cowper’s The Task (1785) to long-forgotten works such as Thomson’s Liberty (1735–6) or Richard Glover’s London (1739). It seems emblematic of the period’s openness to sociological poetry that Bernard Mandeville’s early foray into political economy, The Fable of the Bees (1714), began life as a poem (The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest, 1705).

Personification and “society”

Probably the most famous eighteenth-century poem embodying social theory, Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), features Commerce, Trade, and Wealth merging into Depopulation and controlling the lives of the few remaining villagers. I will return to this work but want to note here the fated contest that Goldsmith stages between the chaste “fair Auburn” (the speaker’s native village) and the decadent “Land by luxury betrayed.” Neither Auburn nor the “rural virtues” can win out against the combined force of Luxury and “the Tyrant’s hand,” a kind of malevolent counterpart to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” about which more in a moment as well.

The error of finding the literary origins of modern ecological consciousness in Romanticism dies hard. This chapter explores how we can find a literary precedent for our contemporary ecological perspective by looking harder at eighteenth-century poetry. If an ecological orientation questions anthropocentrism (seeing the world as revolving around humans) and the tendency to regard the natural world as merely the setting for human actions, it arguably shares more with James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and William Cowper (and others) than with Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. This fact is usually overlooked because it does not fit the conventionally symbolic opposition of an artificial and mechanical Enlightenment to a natural and organic Romanticism. Thus prominent Romanticist and ecocritic Jonathan Bate credits “Romanticism and its afterlife” with overcoming the eighteenth century’s “objectification of the spirit” and undertaking the “imaginative reunification of mind and nature.”

But the idea that poetry might reunite mind and nature surfaced more than a century earlier. Milton wrote in Of Education (1644) that the purpose of education, in which poetry features prominently, is to “repair the ruin of our first parents,” and John Dennis picked up this Edenic vision in 1701 in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry:

Most readers who have not ventured very far into eighteenth-century poetry are likely to think of its “tight little couplets” as heroic couplets, the kind we have been examining. But probably as many or even more poems in the period were written in shorter couplets, whose lines are called iambic tetrameter if one is focusing on their four-beat norm, or simply octosyllabic if one is indicating their length of eight syllables. Readers may have run into tetrameter couplets in the poetry of Swift, now widely anthologized and taught. Swift wrote and published poetry all through his career, from the 1690s into the late 1730s, and many of his poems are among his most engaging work. His best poetry is characteristically not “poetic.” After some early, improbable attempts at writing lofty odes, Swift turned to the informal tetrameter couplet and gave it his distinct stamp in the great satiric poems of the last two decades of his writing life, including poems such as Phyllis, or The Progress of Love (c. 1719), Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General (1722), Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (1735), and The Legion Club (1736). He imprinted the form so memorably that we may automatically associate it with the comic mode generally and more particularly with what may be called Swift’s “anti-poetry” or “pseudo-doggerel.” The former term refers primarily to subject matter (unpoetic stenches and sewage, for example); the latter pertains more to versification and voice. While doggerel is poorly constructed, inept poetry, “pseudo-doggerel” involves pretended ineptitude, an imitation of bad writing in which the author’s skill and cleverness peek through.

Certainly, the tetrameter couplet can lend itself to burlesque humor. The closer together rhymes occur, the closer the effect may be to jingling, especially if the rhymes are somewhat forced –

This chapter aims to help the twenty-first-century reader respond alertly and sympathetically to personification, a prominent feature of eighteenth-century poetry sometimes met with impatience. The first section attempts to recover how personification operated for the period’s poets and readers. The second reexamines the use of gender in creating personifications as significant, not simply conventional, figures; and the third looks at personification as a way of knowing and interpreting the world, not merely decorating it.

Recovering personification

Many modern readers automatically sympathize with Wordsworth’s renunciation of most personification in the Preface of 1800 to Lyrical Ballads:

A forced march through An Essay on Criticism (1711) probably has led far too many students to dislike both the poem and the poet. Pope’s elegant and influential Essay is often included in hurried survey courses as a “two-for”: a poem by a major author and a handy compendium of “critical ideas.” One is likely to walk away from such an experience with the general idea that Pope thought it was important to know the Ancients, take writing seriously, and follow “Nature,” which is “Order” and which will somehow teach the “Rules” all would-be writers need to know. A reader is also likely to get the impression of Pope as clever but dogmatic and perhaps arrogant: “right opinionated,” Thomas Berger’s hero in Little Big Man says after recalling how Pope was read aloud to him as a boy, “like that fellow had the last word on everything.”

This impression is not what Pope was after. One of his rules for good critics is that they must be amiable as well as accurate, speaking with “seeming Diffidence” even when sure of their views, and avoiding “positive” pronouncements:

1. Men must be taught as if you taught them not;

2. And Things unknown propos’d as Things forgot.

Since Pope had the richest poetic career in the eighteenth century, it is not surprising to find the deepest and most sustained metapoetic reflection in his work. But such metapoetic self-consciousness appears in many other writers as well, and focusing on it allows us to see the active tensions in a range of eighteenth-century poetry. Working from within the poetry, rather than assuming a “background” of pre-existent ideas that are then versified, should give us more meaningful ways of reading much of the period’s poetry. Eighteenth-century poems are of course about many things other than poetry; indeed, rarely in literary history has poetry’s purview been wider. Yet poet after poet writes with self-conscious reflection on two metapoetic topics that are theoretically distinguishable but frequently overlap: the nature of poetic vocation and the role of poetry. We sometimes assume that poetry became its own preoccupation only in the modern era, but metapoetic themes abound in eighteenth-century poetry.

The vocation of invocation: melancholy, contemplation, celebration

When Thomas Gray says of the poet within his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard that “Melancholy mark’d him for her own,” he epitomizes an association between the poet and solemnity that had begun to appear earlier in poems by writers such as Anne Finch and Thomas Parnell and that would continue throughout the century. Milton explicitly linked the poet and melancholy in Il Penseroso (16), but Il Penseroso is a somewhat playful poem, paired with a counter-argument, L’Allegro, in which the poet chooses Mirth over Melancholy. Il Penseroso had many imitators in the 1740s and after, but the suggestion that the poet chooses or is chosen by melancholy shows an influence much broader than Milton’s. Renaissance emblem books and other conventional representations associated melancholy with solitude and reading; having a character walk on stage alone carrying a book was enough to indicate his melancholy frame of mind. What becomes stronger in the eighteenth century is the association of melancholy and writing.

One thumbnail generalization in literary history has it that eighteenth-century poetry is about the World, nineteenth-century poetry about the Poet, and twentieth-century poetry about Poetry. Anyone who has heard or made this claim probably suspects it oversimplifies too vastly to be true, and yet it has a stubborn appeal. If we think, say, of Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth and Keats, and Yeats and Wallace Stevens, we may also think of corresponding shifts of emphasis from poems heavily referential (Absalom and Achitophel, An Essay on Man) to autobiographical (The Prelude, Ode to a Nightingale) and to aesthetic (the “Byzantium” poems, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction).

But the more closely we look at the eighteenth century, and especially at the poetry of Pope, the more this supposedly linear narrative of poetic development curves and twists. Pope’s idea of autobiography may not be Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s or Wordsworth’s, but he is one of the more insistently autobiographical of English poets. Paradoxically, this tendency is most explicit in the poems one expects to be least personal, the several Imitations of Horace (1733–8) he wrote in his forties. But autobiographical moments mark major and minor poems from every stage of Pope’s career. Moreover, much of his poetry invites us to read it as metapoetry, that is, as self-reflexive poetry about poetic creation and possibility. In this metapoetic mode Pope arguably influenced mid and late eighteenth-century practice even more than he influenced it stylistically.

Many readers firmly associate eighteenth-century poetry with couplets, as did Plath’s Esther Greenwood, and especially with those pairs of iambic pentameter lines known as “heroic couplets.” Even readers well aware of other verse forms in the period tend to think of the heroic couplet as the age’s emblem. This tendency bears examination since the pentameter couplet has been one of the most common poetic forms in English, from Chaucer into the nineteenth century. It made several appearances in the twentieth century and not only, as we might assume, in witty epigrams or light verse. Here are the opening, wistful lines of Robert Frost’s The Tuft of Flowers, from his first book, A Boy’s Will (1915):

1. I went to turn the grass once after one

2. Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

3. The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

4. Before I came to view the levelled scene.

5. I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

6. I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

7. But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

8. And I must be, as he had been,—alone …

Frost’s are not the sort of lines brought to mind by the phrase “The Age of Pope.” Nor are these lines, from Browning:

1. Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

2. “Frà Pandolf” by design, for never read

3. Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

4. The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

5. But to myself they turned (since none puts by

6. The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

7. And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

8. How such a glance came there; so, not the first …