Six Eighteenth-Century Poets

Informed yet entertaining, Neil Curry's assessment of the works and lives of Thomson, Johnson, Collins, Gray, Smart and Goldsmith challenges the notion that the poetic landscape between the high watermarks of Pope and Wordsworth was something of a bland mudflat. It is the many-sided variety of these poets he stresses and celebrates: Thomson's vivid portrayal of the English countryside; Goldsmith's compassion for the rural poor; the joyous exuberance of Smart's religious verse; Johnson's more sober moral concern; and the flights of imagination and fancy displayed by Collins and Gray. These are not poets who together form a movement or a 'school' and they are not pre-Romantics. What we are shown are six exceptionally gifted poets who deserve to be widely read and enjoyed.

About the author:

Neil Curry is both poet and critic. He has published studies of Christopher Smart, George Herbert and Alexander Pope.

His new and selected poems entitled Other Rooms was published by Enitharmon Press.

300  pages

ISBN: 978-1-906075-50-7