George Gilfillan

The Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett (Dodo Press) George Gilfillan

Publisher Marketing: Includes Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), often referred to simply as Dr Johnson, was one of Englandas greatest literary figures: a poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer and a critic of English literature. He was also a great wit and prose stylist, well known for his aphorisms. Between 1745 and 1755, Johnson wrote perhaps his best-known work, A Dictionary of the English Language. Amongst his other works are The Idler (1758-1760), Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) and The Patriot (1774). Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) was a poet and clergyman. He was one of the so-called aGraveyard poetsa: his aA Night-Piece on Death, ' widely considered the first aGraveyard Schoola poem, was published posthumously in Poems on Several Occasions, collected and edited by Alexander Pope. Thomas Gray (1716-1771), was an English poet, classical scholar and professor of Cambridge University. He began seriously writing poems in 1742. He is regarded as the predominant poetic figure of the mid-18th century. Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771) was a Scottish author, best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1753). Contributor Bio:  Gilfillan, George Edward Young (1681-1765) was an English poet, best remembered for Night Thoughts. Young is said to have been a brilliant talker. Although Night Thoughts is long and disconnected, it abounds in brilliant isolated passages. Its success was enormous. It was translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. In France it became a classic of the romantic school. Questions as to the "sincerity" of the poet did arise in the 100 years after his death. The publication of fawning letters from Young seeking preferment led many readers to question the poet's sincerity. In a famous essay, Worldliness and Other-Worldliness, George Eliot discussed his "radical insincerity as a poetic artist." If Young did not invent "melancholy and moonlight" in literature, he did much to spread the fashionable taste for them. Madame Klopstock thought the king ought to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, and some German critics preferred him to John Milton. Young's essay, Conjectures on Original Composition, was popular and influential on the continent, especially among Germans, as a testament advocating originality over neoclassical imitation. Young wrote good blank verse, and Samuel Johnson pronounced Night Thoughts to be one of "the few poems" in which blank verse could not be changed for rhyme but with disadvantage. The poem was a poetic treatment of sublimity and had a profound influence on the young Edmund Burke, whose philosophic investigations and writings on the Sublime and the Beautiful were a pivotal turn in 18th-century aesthetic theory.