The intellectual transformation in Europe termed the Enlightenment has long been understood as closely associated with ‘the ambition of creating a science of man’. Such a project, an anthropological corollary of Newton's project to unify and systematize the natural sciences, saw efforts on the part of figures from Malebranche to Hume to ‘undertake a systematic investigation of man's nature, practices and social arrangements, parallel in rigour and comprehensiveness to the investigations of the natural world with which they were becoming familiar’. A science of man would integrate the emerging humanistic disciplines of anthropology, comparative religion, economics, linguistics and psychology. Newton's model may have been the best available, but the human sciences differed from it in one major respect: that man was both subject and object of the knowledge that these sciences both studied and produced. This difference is also a difficulty, as Georges Gusdorf notes: ‘La difficulté tient à ce que l'homme est à la fois sujet et objet de la conaissance, en sorte que les problèmes de l'anthropologie ont une complexité intrinsèque plus grande que ceux de la botanique.’ The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century attempts to formulate this self-reflexive science and the implications of such attempts for notions both of disciplinarity and of modernity, have preoccupied a number of eminent European intellectual historians since the 1970s. One scholar has emphasized a dialectic of division and reunification with respect to the emergent disciplines: ‘the famous Enlightenment projects in the division of knowledge often aimed, with greater or lesser explicitness, to provide thereby a new foundation for a unified scheme of knowledge’. The conduct of the project of the human sciences required a governing concept of the human that was then analysed from various disciplinary points of view, each of which produced different emphases in their accounts, and for which the human might come to mean something different. A unified science of man has a dynamic relationship with the various human sciences, through a regulating concept of the human that is posited in the knowledge that it will be revised.

Whilst Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury's aesthetic theory has received substantial attention, the literary, and specifically poetic, dimensions of this theory have received far less. Shaftesbury was not, of course, himself a poet, nor were his views on poetry straightforwardly receptive or engaged. Modern ‘poets’, he wrote, barely deserve the name for ‘having attained the chiming faculty of a language with an injudicious random use of wit and fancy’. They are the most ‘insipid race of mortals’ ‘anywhere to be found’ he wrote, deprecating Shakespeare, Fletcher, Jonson and Milton in turn. An example taken from a work he celebrates as the ‘justest of modern poems’ – John Sheffield's (Lord Mulgrave's) Art of Poetry (first published 1682) – might make us wonder whether this great theorist of ‘taste’ was sadly deficient when it came to evaluating verse:

Yet, in this chapter I hope to show that Shaftesbury's poetic theory is richly interesting both for an understanding of his larger philosophical project, and for the way it speaks to current literary-critical preoccupations. Shaftesbury explicitly relates the domains of poetry and philosophy, relations that have returned to the forefront of much literary criticism focused on the long eighteenth century.

But where modern scholars link poetry and philosophy through, for example, the cognitive aspects of verse, or theories of affect and feeling, or modern disciplinarity, Shaftesbury finds a different conduit for their relations: the Stoic tradition of self-division and dialogue. Poetry is figured by Shaftesbury as a form of work on the human self enjoined by Stoic philosophy, and here a distinctively poetic contribution to Enlightenment ‘human science’ may begin to be traced.