The Lives of the Poets
Johnson's Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of
the English Poets (familiarly known as the Lives of the
Poets, but pay attention to the actual title), originally
appeared between 1779
and 1781
in the format their title suggests: as prefatory material to a
large collection of the works of around fifty poets. They were
first collected together in 1781.
Most of the Lives can be divided into three sections: a
biography (usually collected from other sources; Johnson did
little original research); a brief "character"; and a critical
section, in which Johnson considers all of the major works of
the author in question. These critical sections provide some of
Johnson's most extended literary criticism.
Although most of the Lives were written especially for the
collection, Johnson's Life of
Savage had originally been published in 1744.
Johnson knew Savage well in the years after he arrived in London,
and that intimacy contributes to the great difference in tone
between Savage and the other lives (to say nothing, of
course, of the decades that separate their writing).
With over fifty poets (all men, incidentally) drawn from the
years between the Restoration and the 1770s (no
living poets were included), some of the figures are pretty
minor: Yalden and Pomfret, for instance. Note, though, that
Johnson chose only a few of the poets to be included; most of
the editorial decisions were made by the booksellers who
organized the edition.
Apart from Savage, the Lives that have received
the most attention tend to be those of the most important
poets: Cowley (which helped to popularize the term
"metaphysical poetry"), Milton (Johnson attacked his politics as
those of "a surly and acrimonious republican" and had scathing
things to say about Lycidas -- "easy, vulgar, and
therefore disgusting" -- but he recognized the greatness of
Paradise Lost), Dryden, Addison, and Pope. The Life
of Swift, one of the weaker Lives, gets comparatively
little commentary in spite of its famous subject.
Editions
The only complete modern edition is The Lives of the
Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1905). Selections appear in many anthologies, which focus especially
on Savage and the critical sections from a few major lives --
Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, and sometimes Swift.
A separate edition of The Life of Savage was edited by
Clarence Tracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), which pays far
more attention to textual questions than Hill's old edition
did.
Criticism
The criticism in the Lives is central in most
considerations of Johnson as a critic, so works like Hagstrum's,
Keast's, and Hinnant's are good places to start. For the
biographical side of things, see Folkenflik.
- Jean H. Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson's Literary
Criticism, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967).
- W. R. Keast, "The Theoretical Foundation of Johnson's
Criticism," in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952).
- Robert Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson: Biographer
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978).
- Charles H. Hinnant, "Steel for the Mind": Samuel Johnson
and Critical Discourse (Newark, Del.: Associated Univ.
Press, 1994).
- Martin Maner, The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and
Dialectic in Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" (Athens: Univ.
of Georgia Press, 1988).
- Bergen B. Evans, "Dr. Johnson's Theory of Biography," Review of
English Studies, 10 (July 1934), 301-10.
- Benjamin Boyce, "Samuel Johnson's Criticism of Pope in the Life of
Pope," Review of English Studies, n.s., 5 (January 1954),
37-46.
- Benjamin Boyce, "Johnson's Life of Savage and Its Literary
Background," Studies in Philology, 53 (October 1956), 576-98.
- J. D. Fleeman, "The Making of Johnson's Life of
Savage, 1744," The Library, 22 (1976), 346-52.
- Clarence R. Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard
Savage (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1953). Not on Johnson himself, but an important companion to
Johnson's Life of Savage.
This is part of a Guide to Samuel
Johnson by Jack Lynch. I
welcome comments at jlynch@andromeda.rutgers.edu.