Introduction

Abstract

This volume arises from the Bill Overton Memorial Conference on ‘Eighteenth-Century Poetry’ convened in September 2013 by Dr Joanna Fowler, Professor Elaine Hobby and Professor Allan Ingram. The subject of the conference was chosen because of Bill’s career-long enthusiasm for and engagement with eighteenth-century verse, most evident in his work on the poetry of the ‘Anonymous Lady’, on the verse epistle and in the edition of the poetry of Lord Hervey on which he was working when he died in September 2012.