Restoration and Augustian Poets: Milton to Holdsmith

Comprehensive volume covering the Restoration and Augustan Poets from Milton to Goldsmith. A wonderful paperback in the series of volumes on English poetry.

In England the latter half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth saw a changing attitude toward man and nature typified in the course of poetry from Paradise Lost through An Essay on Man to “The Deserted Village.” Britain in this era was the centre of revolutionary and “progressive” ideas, wherein Reason was enthroned as the divine human quality. Characteristic of the poets of the period was a consciousness of their historical position – a consciousness of themselves as “moderns” – as well as a passion for the civilised life, epitomised in, for example, Pope’s The Dunciad. Such outstanding examples as Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Smart’s “A Song to David,” and Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” are here given in full, while shorter poetry is represented generously.