The Literary Criticism: ‘propriety of thought’

Abstract

In his early poem, The Young Author, Johnson mockingly sets out the fate of the hopeful scribbler, yearning for immortality. Warned in vain that These dreams were Settle’s once and Ogilby’s’, he launches his first pamphlet, into what turns out to be a scathing, derisive reception. He flees back to obscurity, ‘Glad to be hid, and proud to be forgot.’ When Johnson accepted the commission for the Lives of the English Poets, he set himself a task which involved, many times over, the scrutiny of authorial hopes and their fate, over the previous hundred years. The very nature of the subject entailed the continual confrontation of briefly-held hopes with the perspective of a century. If the Lives of the Poets includes neither Settle nor Ogilby, it contains its Blackmores and Philips as well as its Dryden and Pope; and though the careers he considers were often far more locally successful than the ‘young Author’s’, time still has the last say on hopes of immortality. Even with relatively major figures, the pattern into which their lives are shaped by Johnson often seems to be an ironic one, of blasted hope.