Samuel Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ (1783)

Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1783): "The Life of Pope"

                                        (Dr. Johnson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds)

Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was probably the foremost literary person in Enlightenment England. A polymath, he wrote a play, Irene (performed 1749); compiled his famous Dictionary (1755); wrote neoclassical verse, such as "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749), a widely-praised imitation of Juvenal's tenth satire; founded the journals The Rambler (1750-52) and The Idler (1758-60) and contributed over 300 essays to them; produced a respected edition of Shakespeare (1765), most famous for its Preface; wrote travel literature, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775), a trip he took with his future biographer, James Boswell; and finally The Lives of the Poets (1779-83), a six-volume account of almost every important poet and literary movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

(The title page of the first volume of the Lives)

The Lives combines biography and general literary criticism, written in Johnson's periodic, balanced, aphoristic style.  The sections on Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, John Milton, John Dryden, Thomas Gray, and Alexander Pope are sometimes considered the finest of the lot.  His "Life" of Richard Savage, a struggling poet, might be the best. A study of the entire collection of biographies provides a history of literary issues in English literature over a century's time. Johnson was hardly unbiased and read his writers with his mode of thinking always intact, which means that he did not value or appreciate some writers we value now, and vice versa.

 (Alexander Pope, by Michael Dahl)

Excerpts from "The Life of Pope" might provide an idea of Johnson's theoretical stances on literature.  These are taken from pp. 2956-58 in our textbook.

Here is a link to volume 4 of the original 1781 publication for Pope's biography

Of his intellectual character, the constituent and fundamental principle was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception of consonance and propriety. He saw immediately, of his own conceptions, what was to be chosen, and what to be rejected; and in the works of others, what was to be shunned, and what was to be copied.

Pope had . . . a mind active, ambitious and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; inits widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavoring more than it can do.

he . . . was never content with mediocrity when excellence could be attained. . . . to make verses was his first labor, and to mend them was his last.

From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If conversation offered anything that could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an expression more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion.

The method of Pope . . . was to write his first thoughts in his first words, and gradually to amplify, decorate, rectify, and refine them.

When he could produce nothing new, he was at liberty to be silent.

Pope was not content to satisfy; he desired to excel, and therefore always endeavored to do his best: . . . expecting no indulgence from others, he showed none to himself. He examined lines and words with minute and punctilious observation, and retouched every part with indefatigable diligence, till he had left nothing to be forgiven.

Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and leveled by the roller.