Although the Whig parliamentary party secured a political hegemony in the first half of the 18th century, the poets that shared these politics are marginal figures. This book offers a fresh perspective on the literary culture of the period, arguing that many long-neglected Whig poets — frequently derided as hacks and dunces by prominent writers such as Pope and Dryden — actually enjoyed considerable success and acclaim in their own time. Authors such as Joseph Addison, John Dennis, and Thomas Tickell saw themselves and were seen as part of an ambitious project to remodel and reform English lit ... More

Although the Whig parliamentary party secured a political hegemony in the first half of the 18th century, the poets that shared these politics are marginal figures. This book offers a fresh perspective on the literary culture of the period, arguing that many long-neglected Whig poets — frequently derided as hacks and dunces by prominent writers such as Pope and Dryden — actually enjoyed considerable success and acclaim in their own time. Authors such as Joseph Addison, John Dennis, and Thomas Tickell saw themselves and were seen as part of an ambitious project to remodel and reform English literary culture, alongside the contemporary transformations of political and social life in post-Revolution England. They and other Whig writers responded to the imaginative challenges of contemporary public life with enthusiasm and confidence, convinced that the political liberties established by the Revolution offered the opportunity to create a new native literary culture that was distinctively Whiggish. Their elevated poetry celebrating the political and military achievements of William III's Britain was funded and distributed through substantial patronage from the Whig aristocracy, who collaborated with Whig publishers such as Jacob Tonson to produce prestigious editions of poems that were promoted as a new English literature to rival that of classical Greece and Rome. This study offers an account of this literary tradition and examines contemporary reactions to the Whig poets, probing the relationship between political and literary evaluation that has so influenced the formation of the early 18th-century poetic canon.