This was the best-selling poetry anthology of the eighteenth century, edited by the most celebrated publisher of the era, Alexander Pope's protege, Robert Dodsley. It includes poems by Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, David Garrick, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Horace Walpole, Joseph and Thomas Warton, James Thomson, Elizabeth Carter, Pope himself, and many others. The Collection of Poems is an invaluable index of literary culture in the eighteenth century, and yet despite its great popularity and influence, it has not been in print for more than two hundred years.

This set publishes two of the most influential critical works of the eighteenth century together for the first time. Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance and the second (enlarged) edition of Thomas Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen appeared within a few months of each other in 1762. These two books, which together represented a new 'historical' criticism, established Spenser's Faerie Queene as a 'romantic' poem in the tradition of medieval romance and fictions of chivalry.
With the recent surge of interest in the eighteenth century origins of the...

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.