Eighteenth-century poetry - David Fairer

This eagerly awaited annotated anthology reveals the rich variety of poetic output in a period, 1700–1800, that is rapidly growing in popularity among scholars and students alike. The anthology has been designed to provide the widest possible range of texts. All the poems have full foot–of–page annotation and generous headnotes and the 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) is placed alongside work by other writers, particularly women (Sarah Egerton, Mary Jones, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld), with strong and distinctive voices.

The editors present complete texts, or whole books of longer poems (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) which develop extended arguments, and also provide generous coverage of those middle–length pieces in which eighteenth–century poets also loved to argue and to meditate.

Eighteenth–century Poetry is an indispensable anthology for the course director in eighteenth–century poetry, for the student in classroom and study, and for the general reader.