Eighteenth Century Poetry : Annotated Anthology

This eagerly awaited annotated anthology reveals the rich variety of poetic output in a period 1700-1800, that is rapidly growing in popularity. The anthology provides the widest possible range of texts. It places work of the traditionally prominent figures (such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, James Thomson, Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Robert Burns, and William Cowper) alongside work by other writers, particularly women with strong and distinctive voices (Sarah Egerton, Mary Jones, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld). All the poems have full foot-of-page annotation and generous headnotes.

The Anthology presents complete texts, or whole books of longer poems which develop extended arguments (John Gay's Trivia, Pope's The Dunciad Variorum, Thomson's The Seasons, Richard Savage's The Wanderer, Mark Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination, Cowper's The Task). It also provides generous coverage of those middle-length pieces in which eighteenth-century poets also loved to argue and to meditate.