Johnson the Poet is the first book to deal comprehensively with the poetry of Samuel Johnson. It provides critical commentary on Johnson’s long and versatile poetic career as novice poet, formal verse imitator and satirist, playwright, moralist, neo-Latinist, elegist, prologuist, and writer of impromptu drawing-room versewhile setting his verse in eighteenth-century political, theological, moral, and literary contexts. The book includes an appendix with texts and the author’s translations of Johnson’s Latin poems.
