Johnson the poet

the long version

"Johnson the Poet is the first book to deal with the entire canon of Samuel Johnson's poetry, written over the course of almost sixty years, from 1725 to 1784. It provides critical commentary on Johnson's long and versatile poetic career - as novice poet, formal verse imitator and satirist, playwright, moralist and closet theologian, neo-Latinist, elegist, prologuist, and writer of impromptu drawing-room verse - while setting his verse in eighteenth-century political, theological, moral, and literary contexts. Through this combination of close reading and contextualized analysis, the book explores Johnson's complicated attitude toward the prevailing conventions of eighteenth-century poetics and the enterprise of writing poetry."--BOOK JACKET.