Augustan

The first half of the 18th century, during which English poets such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift emulated Virgil, Ovid, and Horace.

Because James Thomson’s long, reflective landscape poem The Seasons (1730) commanded so much attention and affection for at least 100 years after he wrote it, his achievement has been identified with it. Thomson...

Of all English poets, Thomas Chatterton seemed to his great Romantic successors most to typify a commitment to the life of imagination. His poverty and untimely suicide represented the martyrdom of the poet...

Samuel Johnson, the premier English literary figure of the mid and late 18th century, was a writer of exceptional range: a poet, a lexicographer, a translator, a journalist and essayist, a travel writer, a...

Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, essayist, and political pamphleteer Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He spent much of his early adult life in England before returning to Dublin to serve as Dean of St...

The acknowledged master of the heroic couplet and one of the primary tastemakers of the Augustan age, British writer Alexander Pope was a central figure in the Neoclassical movement of the early 18th century...

An essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright, Goldsmith was born in Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ireland. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and studied medicine in Edinburgh but never received ...

The son of nonconformist parents and an admirer of the Quakers, Matthew Green worked as a clerk in a customhouse and wrote occasional verse. He is author of The Grotto, a Poem (1732), about Queen Caroline’...

British poet Mary Jones was born in 1707 and raised in Oxford. Her brother, with whom she lived for most of her adult life, served as a reverend and chanter for Christ Church Cathedral. Influenced by Alexander...

Warren Hastings, who would become governor-general of Bengal, was born in Oxfordshire, England. His mother died shortly after his birth, and his father disappeared in the West Indies. Hastings was raised by...

William Collins is regarded as one of the most skilled 18th-century lyric poets. Marking a transitional period in English literature, Collins’s style is formally Neoclassical but presages the themes of the...

Isaac Watts was a scion of seventeenth-century Independent Dissent, a religious culture distinguished by its attention to local congregational authority, the education of preachers and people, and the cultivation...

Matthew Prior was the most important poet writing in England between the death of John Dryden (1700) and the poetic maturity of Alexander Pope (about 1712). A significant influence on British and German poetry...

Best known as a letter writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote verses all her life and frequently referred to herself as a "poet." From the young girl, as she later described herself, "trespassing" in Latin...

Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea, was an English poet and courtier in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. She was a major female poet during her lifetime, whose work spanned genres and addressed ...

Nothing is known definitely of poet, playwright, and musician Henry Carey’s origins. He was born before the end of 1689, perhaps as early as 1687, probably in Yorkshire. The date is deduced from his probable...

Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in 1660 in London, the son of a butcher (he began to use “Defoe” more frequently beginning in 1696). Defoe became a merchant but went bankrupt in 1692 and left the world of...

Alongside Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray is one of the most important English poets of the 18th century. Samuel Johnson was the first of many critics to put forward the view that Gray spoke in two languages, ...

William Cowper (pronounced Cooper) was the foremost poet of the generation between Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth. For several decades, he had probably the largest readership of any English poet. From...

Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World Poet. Her volume of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America ... received considerable favorable attention when it...