Book: The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

Overview

Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, first published in 1779 as the opening volumes of a larger project and completed in 1781, gathers biographical sketches and critical prefaces for dozens of poets who shaped English verse from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Commissioned by London booksellers to introduce a collected edition of English poets, Johnson transforms the assignment into a commanding survey of a tradition, blending portraiture, anecdote, and argument. The result is both a gallery of vivid lives and a sustained attempt to articulate what poetry is for, how it works, and why some writers endure.

Scope and Method

Johnson’s subjects range from Abraham Cowley and John Milton through John Dryden and Alexander Pope to later figures like Thomas Gray, William Collins, Edward Young, and James Thomson. He arranges each life as a narrative of education, character, patrons, publications, and fortunes, then turns to analysis of the works, weighing design, diction, meter, and moral tendency. He consults letters, memoirs, and testimonies while also drawing on conversation and tradition; the scholarship is energetic if uneven, and the portraits are sharpened by Johnson’s eye for motive, circumstance, and habit. Always, biography serves criticism: the poet’s conduct and intellectual temper illuminate the verse, and the verse in turn exposes the character.

Critical Principles

Johnson’s touchstones are clarity, proportion, and truth to nature; poetry ought to please and instruct, harmonizing imagination with judgment. He distrusts obscurity and extravagance, especially when wit is prized over sense. His often-quoted verdict on the metaphysical poets accuses them of bringing “heterogeneous ideas…yoked by violence together, ” yet he also recognizes their ingenuity and learning. He values correctness and polish in style and favors rhyme, cadence, and argumentative structure, exemplified by the heroic couplet. Moral concerns are central: poetry that refines manners, enlarges sympathy, and steadies the mind ranks highest. Taste, for Johnson, is disciplined freedom, not license.

Notable Judgments

Milton emerges as a figure of austere genius whose epic magnitude Johnson deeply respects, even as he challenges the coldness of some shorter poems and questions political sternness that colors Milton’s prose and verse. Dryden is celebrated for breadth, vigor, and flexibility, the founder of a modern idiom capable of reasoning in numbers. Pope stands as the supreme master of the couplet, a poet of finish, urbanity, and ethical reflection, though Johnson admits limits to Pope’s sublimity while exalting his precision and control. Cowley’s Pindarics and Donne’s conceits provoke censure for strained analogies, yet Johnson restores their importance by mapping their aims and influence. He praises the humane pathos and universal recognizability of Gray’s “Elegy, ” while finding the later odes cold and affected. Collins’s delicacy and melancholy are sympathetically drawn, though his obscurity troubles Johnson. Young’s Night Thoughts is esteemed for grave meditation, tempered by complaints about monotony. Thomson’s Seasons is praised for descriptive amplitude and moral coloring. In the life of Savage, Johnson’s earlier biographical art returns with a stern compassion that tests the boundary between fidelity to fact and loyalty to a friend.

Style and Legacy

The Lives is written in Johnson’s mature prose: balanced, aphoristic, and hospitable to nuance yet capable of decisive judgment. Its portraits helped fix a canon and a vocabulary of evaluation that later critics had to confront, adopt, or resist. Romantic readers bristled at his reservations about sublimity without system and the preference for rule, but even their dissent kept Johnson’s questions alive. As literary history, it locates English poetry within civic, religious, and commercial life; as criticism, it models how to read with moral intelligence and a steady ear. The book remains the classic English example of literary biography fused with criticism, a standard of sane taste and a record of strong preferences stated with memorable force.