Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Contemporary Study of Eighteenth‐Century Poetry
Authors: Rounce Adam 
Published: November 2007

Author's Introduction

This is an outline for teaching a twelve week seminar course on eighteenth‐century poetry; it is a supplement to my article, which was an account of recent critical developments in the field (unlikely to be the subject of a course of study in themselves). The choices made are, of course, very subjective, but it is intended to represent the range of poetry available. To achieve this, the course is organised by form, or genre, rather than by theme or by strict chronology. Even so, there are omissions, notably longer and very important works such as Thomson's Seasons and Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination. Given that much of this poetry is, with the exception of a few well‐known texts, unlikely to be familiar to students, the emphasis is very much on the primary materials and the connections that could be made between them, rather than on secondary reading. There is a significant amount of criticism of eighteenth‐century poetry, and the most pertinent texts and articles for specific authors can be easily gleaned from the original article, or elsewhere. The poems chosen are rarely obscure, and can almost all be found easily in the anthologies listed below, or on the Internet.

Author Recommends

Study of the poetry of the period was given impetus by two anthologies edited by Roger Lonsdale. The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), and Eighteenth‐Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) both provided widespread access to many overlooked or forgotten figures. The former is notable primarily for the range of annotated verse it contains; the latter has useful introductory headnotes. An influential teaching anthology is Eighteenth Century Poetry (London: Longman, 1999), edited by David Fairer and Christine Gerrard. This has very full introductions and annotation, an eclectic range of texts, and a policy of including at least a full book from longer works, rather than only an extract.

There are many general introductions to eighteenth‐century poetry. For the first half of the century Margaret Anne Doody's The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), has accessibility and enthusiasm, as does David Fairer's English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003), which covers a lot of ground, and is particularly useful in delineating the different qualities of distinct genres. The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, edited by Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), has contextual chapters, descriptions of genres and forms, and separate introductory accounts of the most important poems and volumes of the century.

Online Materials

There are many disparate Web sites, mostly connected with universities, offering either texts of eighteenth‐century poems, annotated editions, bibliographies, critical introductions and the like. These can be found from a useful starting point: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/index.html.

Databases of literature have opened up the study of poetry, offering vast collections of the familiar and the utterly obscure, providing texts and areas for essays and assignments for students. Unfortunately, the two most useful are only available if a university library is a subscriber. These are Eighteenth Century Collections Online <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO> and the English Poetry Database <http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk>.

Sample Syllabus

Week 1: Satire

Reading: Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock; Jonathan Swift, A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed.

[Themes: Introduction to poetry in the eighteenth century; diction and couplet poetics; mock‐epic; representations of gender and female sexuality.]

Week 2: Satire and morality

Pope, Moral Essays: ‘On the Characters of Women’, ‘To Lord Bathurst, on the Uses of Riches’.

[Satiric technique in couplets; verse paragraphs; the purposes of irony, and moral tales; satiric distance, and dissidence; does satire want to reform the world, or to vex it? Different characters and inset stories can be assigned to students to prepare for this session, depending on the general level of student familiarity with and confidence in the area.]

Week 3: Satiric exchanges

Pope, The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated; Montagu and Hervey, Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace.

[A specific response to Pope's satire: how accurate (or indeed deserved) are the criticisms by Montagu and Hervey? Are they exaggerated by spite, and to what degree do they succeed in their aim? It is useful to break Pope's imitation into sections of ten lines, and make students prepare a section each (glossing names and allusions, etc.,) the week before.]

Week 4: Satire and the presentation of the self

Swift, Verses on the Death of Dr Swift.

[The presentation of the personality veiled by layers of ambiguity, which cannot be understood by the post‐Romantic assumption of art as ‘self‐expression’. Comparison of the practice of Swift (and Pope) with modern or post‐modern examples of a manufactured self, which expresses the ambiguities inherent in the concepts of authorship, fame, and posterity.]

Week 5: Lyric poetry

Anne Finch, To the Nightingale; Matthew Prior, The Lady's Looking Glass; Montagu, A Hymn to the Moon; Christopher Smart, On a Bed of Guernsey Lilies; Anna Laetitia Barbauld, To Mr Barbauld; Robert Burns, To a Mouse.

[Lyric, self‐expression, and liberation or otherwise (Finch, Barbauld); meditation and philosophy (Montagu, Prior, Burns); religious beauty and sin (Smart).]

Week 6: The ode

Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College; Joseph Warton, Ode to Evening; William Collins, To Evening, On the Poetical Character, On the Death of Mr Thomson; Thomas Warton, Ode Written at Vale‐Royal Abbey.

[Nostalgia, and Gray's vision of childhood, compared to Blake's Songs; the imaginative use of place (Joseph Warton, Collins); the purpose of poetry (Collins); the gothic, primitivism and older traditions (Collins, Thomas Warton).]

Week 7: Elegy

Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; Samuel Johnson, On the Death of Dr Robert Levet.

[Questions of humility, resignation, and fulfilment in an afterlife; the general and specific poetic uses of elegy in the century; does Gray's poem – either in its original, or revised state – find an equivalent to the hard certainties of Johnson's poem of mourning, or is it more remote from human frailty and suffering?]

Week 8: Ballads

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Lover; Johnson, A Short Song of Congratulation; Thomas Chatterton, An Excelente Balade of Charitie; selections from Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (including Chevy‐Chase, Sir Patrick Spence).

[The uses of the ballad for informal and less elevated expression (Montagu); the comic and the tragic; the ballad and fake medievalism (Chatterton); different versions of history (Chevy‐Chase); ghost stories; murder ballads; folk‐memory and fatalism (Sir Patrick Spence).]

Week 9: Pastoral and protest

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village; George Crabbe, from The Village, Peter Grimes.

[Sentiment and sensibility, and the opposition to false nostalgia and the idealising of rural life; depopulation and attacks on luxury and empire; the move from character types to the psychology of the disturbed; moral uses of landscape.]

Week 10: The eighteenth‐century sonnet

Gray, On the Death of Richard West; Thomas Warton, To the River Lodon; Anna Seward, sonnets to Honora Sneyd; Charlotte Smith, from Elegiac Sonnets; William Lisle Bowles, from Sonnets, Written Chiefly on Picturesque Spots.

[The sonnet's decline; rediscovery as a private form, where expression is deliberately muted and not public (Gray); sensibility, and excesses of feeling (Seward); personal uses of descriptive scenes (Warton, Smith, Bowles); continuity with the Romantic sonnet.]

Week 11: Meditative poetry

Mark Akenside, Inscriptions; William Cowper, Yardley Oak; Anna Seward, Eyam.

[The use of the incidental to describe the most significant of feelings; the reflections of psychology and history in landscape and place; revelation of the subjective; fatalism and history.]

Week 12: Religious poetry and the end of the century

Cowper, Lines Supposed to Have Been Written by Alexander Selkirk, The Castaway; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

[Different versions of religious experience and spiritual autobiography; conclusive and inconclusive narratives; damnation, reprieved and otherwise; Calvinism contrasted with more ecumenical religions. The continuity of eighteenth‐century poetry.]

Focus Questions

What are the most obvious differences between a poem from the eighteenth century, and one written after 1950?

How do Pope and Swift present themselves in their poetry? What effect does this have on the reader, and do you think this effect was different in the eighteenth century?

How does poetic form influence content in the eighteenth century?

The word ‘nostalgia’ first appeared in print in the second half of the eighteenth‐century; how does the concept of nostalgia help our understanding of some of the leading poets between 1750 and 1780?

Much eighteenth‐century poetry appears to be fatalistic, rather than optimistic. Where does it find its consolations?

Seminar/Project Idea

In class, students are given sections of a poem (such as stanzas of Gray's Elegy) and asked to turn them into a prose paraphrase, relating the sentiments and descriptive terms accurately in their own idiom. For an assignment, they have to do the same, choosing one text studied in class, and one taken from elsewhere, of the same form or genre. They also have to submit an accompanying version of their own, on the same theme, using whatever form of prose or poetry they choose, from octosyllabics to limericks. Parodies are encouraged.