The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

One of the two lowest of the twelve, and the subtractive test shows why. The scope was set by booksellers. Take away the lives of Sprat, Halifax, Stepney, Duke, King, Yalden, Pomfret or Walsh and nothing Johnson has to say is lost: several are thin compilations from Cibber’s Lives and like sources, done to fill the set, and the Life of Young is largely Croft’s. Against that, the great lives are compelled from within. In the Milton, the Dryden and the Pope the life is required by the criticism and the criticism by the life, and the Savage is a life that is its own argument. The minor lives serve as ground and as history, but a history could lose a dozen of them. About half the book is required, and that half supremely.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The book’s verdicts are often narrow or wrong by later lights, on Lycidas, on Gray’s odes, on Milton’s sonnets, and much of its biography is anecdote. But disclosure is not correctness of taste, and what the book brings into the open holds. That the life of a writer is a moral life like any other: the Savage shows genius and self-destruction together and excuses neither. That poetry is answerable to the reader, finally to the common reader, and lives when it offers “images which find a mirror in every mind”. That the trade of letters, patronage giving way to the market, makes and breaks the writer. These are meanings, not moods. The axis stops a tenth short of 9 because they are stated, often in general terms, more than discovered through the particular.

Score: 8.9 / 10

This is criticism and biography in a judicial prose whose whole manner distrusts transport, and long stretches, the minor lives, the catalogues of editions, the accounts of pensions, are flat by design. Elevation comes in a recognisable kind and at intervals. The close of the Savage, the man of genius dying in a Bristol prison, has a grave, unforced pathos. The Milton rises in its account of the blind poet at work on Paradise Lost in poverty and danger. The parallel of Dryden and Pope is a sustained height of judgment. The tribute to Gilbert Walmsley in the Edmund Smith, with its sentence on the death of Garrick that “eclipsed the gaiety of nations”, is height of the moral and elegiac kind. It recurs through the great lives without being the book’s element.

Score: 8.0 / 10

One of the two lowest of the twelve. A book of judgment does not build myth, and Johnson distrusts it: he deflates the legends round Milton, Pope and Swift and prefers the fact to the figure. The archetypal weight it carries comes two ways. The Savage makes the outcast genius, the poet who is his own worst enemy, destroyed by pride, poverty and grievance, into a figure the culture kept. And the run from Cowley to Lyttelton tells a story of English poetry refined from extravagance to correctness, through Waller and Denham to Dryden and then Pope, a myth of progress later critics fought for a century. What holds the axis is that this second structure is a myth of literary history, not of the human condition, and the particular lives are not lifted into figure.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Johnson was not the first to write the lives of English poets: Langbaine, Jacob and Cibber’s Lives of 1753 came before him, and Dryden’s prefaces and Addison on Milton before his criticism. The commission was hackwork, a set of prefaces for a publishers’ edition. The turn is in what he made of it. He fused biography and criticism at full scale for a national poetry, and he refused the puff the occasion invited: the Milton calls its subject “an acrimonious and surly republican” and finds in Lycidas that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing”; the Gray dismisses the Pindaric odes; the Swift is cold. He offended the admirers of Gray and Milton, drew pamphlets, and stood on judgments he knew to be unpopular. A large turn on an inherited occasion, at a cost he paid.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The form is a series of prefaces, not designed as a book; its unity is the booksellers’ list, and the threefold pattern of life, character and criticism is a convenience Johnson does not always keep. But the form carries what the book knows. Its claim, that a poet’s work is to be read with and against the life and judged by one standard, is enacted by the passage within each major life from what the man did to what he was to what he made, each colouring the next; the Pope shows it most clearly, the small, ailing, scheming, devoted man and then the poetry of correctness. The chronological series turns the judgments into a history without a separate history being written. A treatise or a set of memoirs would lose the joining. The minor lives do not take the form fully.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The evidence is two and a half centuries of return. The book was argued with at once by the defenders of Gray and Milton; it became the thing the Romantic critics defined themselves against; it was read by Hazlitt and by Macaulay; and it was reopened in the twentieth century from the other side. Eliot’s essays on the metaphysical poets argue directly with the Cowley, and he later wrote on Johnson as critic and poet; Leavis’s Revaluation and the reassessment of Augustan poetry return to Johnson’s terms. The Savage has been read as biography, as a study of its author’s own Grub Street years, and as an early psychology of self-ruin. Lonsdale’s annotated edition of 2006 shows the scholarship continuing at full scale. What holds the axis below 9 is that the yield is concentrated in perhaps a dozen lives; the rest are mined for fact.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is English letters of the later eighteenth century, criticism and biography above all, with poetry as the object. The intrinsic force is the founding of the critical biography of English writers as a form, and the setting of the terms in which English poetry from Cowley to Gray was judged for a century; the Cowley made “metaphysical” the name of a school, where Dryden had used the word of Donne alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Boswell’s Life of Johnson turns the method on its author; the Romantic critics, Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818) among them, wrote against its standards; Eliot from 1921 and Leavis reversed its verdicts while keeping its terms; and the university study of English inherited its canon of the period and its joining of life to work. Against a higher figure: on poetry itself it worked as resistance more than redirection, and its reach outside English is small.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Joint highest of the twelve. The span is from 1779, close on two and a half centuries. The text survives whole, in Johnson’s own revision of 1783, with no doubt about what he wrote except the known case of Croft’s Young. It has been in print continuously since 1779, edited twice at full scale, by G. B. Hill in 1905 and by Roger Lonsdale in four volumes in 2006, and is quoted constantly. But its presence is narrow in kind: it is read mainly in the academy and by students of criticism, very largely in selections, the Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Savage and Gray, and the whole is seldom read through by the common reader it invokes. The major lives have never been out of use, which sets it at the top of the lower band.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Joint highest of the twelve, judged on Johnson’s English. The making is uneven: the minor lives are often perfunctory compilations, there are slips of fact and of dating, and a taste for general statement sometimes flattens a poem into a verdict. But the prose of the great lives is Johnson at his ripest, plainer and quicker than the Rambler, its antithesis an instrument of judgment, not ornament: Addison’s prose is “familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious”; of Paradise Lost, “None ever wished it longer than it is”. The definition of metaphysical wit in the Cowley is criticism as exact as any in the language, and the parallel of Dryden and Pope is built clause against clause until the judgment is in the syntax. The Savage tells a squalid life with unbroken dignity. The unevenness elsewhere is what holds the axis at 9.0.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the pages on Savage’s nights in the streets and his death in prison, and a notice of two paragraphs on a Restoration courtier-poet; or the Milton’s political invective and the Gray’s concurrence with the common reader. One law governs them: truth to general nature and to experience, the moral seriousness of a life, and the reader’s pleasure as the final court. Johnson applies it to Milton, whom he dislikes as a man and reveres as a poet, as to Pope, whom he loves and still calls to account; the standard that condemns Lycidas praises the Elegy. The law holds across a century and more of poets and every scale of life. What lowers the axis is that it holds better than the texture: the minor lives obey it only by being thin, and prejudice, on Milton’s politics and on Swift, bends the judicial temper.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The book holds the literary history of England from the Civil War to the accession of George III, and through it the political history: the republic and Milton, the Restoration court, the Revolution, the quarrels of Whig and Tory in which Addison, Swift and Pope took part. It holds the economics of authorship, patronage and subscription and the booksellers’ market; religion, in the piety of Watts and the scepticism Johnson distrusts; illness, poverty and madness, in Pope’s body, Savage’s ruin and Collins’s mind; friendship and rivalry; and the nature of poetry. All of it is integrated through one judging mind. What it does not hold: the domestic and labouring worlds beyond the writer’s, the natural order except as described in verse, and English poetry before Cowley, which the selection excluded. A great breadth, held within the life of letters.

Score: 8.3 / 10