English Poets of the Eighteenth Century

The eighteenth century in England was a literary battleground where wit sharpened against sentiment, and measured order wrestled with the first stirrings of wildness. This anthology captures that magnificent friction in full: from Alexander Pope's devastating precision and Samuel Johnson's moral weight, to Robert Burns's raunchy Scots voice and William Blake's blazing, prophetic visions. Ernest Bernbaum's curation deliberately pairs the canonical with the obscure, revealing a literary landscape where celebrated verses sit beside forgotten ones, each reflecting its moment's particular anxieties and aspirations. These poets wrote of empire and empire's costs, of faith and doubt, of reason and its limits. They were the last writers to believe thoroughly in wit, and the first to sense that something larger was coming. For anyone seeking to understand how English poetry arrived at its modern self, this collection provides the essential record.