Affect of Literary Patronage on Early Eighteenth Centruy Poetry

Examine how literary patronage affected the role of the poet in the early eighteenth century.

The eighteenth century saw both the emergence and growth of a willing to learn, literate middle-class and the death throes of patronage. Poets still sought patrons , but, gradually, their own writings would support them, at least partially . This is a period of writers’ quarrels between those supporting patronage and those who did not, as well as between those supporting the Tory party —also known at the beginning as the “Court Party”, in favour of the gentry, the English Church and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy—, and those supporting the Whig party —originally called the “Country Party”, opposing absolute rule and in favour of dissenters and great aristochratic families—. According to Ann Willardson Engar in her article ‘English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century’ :

In the first half of the century, poets aligned themselves according to politics. Addison and Whigs such as Ambrose Philips reigned at Button’s coffeehouse. The Tories—Swift, Gay, Thomas Parnell, Pope, and John Arbuthnot—formed the Scriblerus Club and met at Arbuthnot’s apartments in St. James’s Palace. Thomas Parnell and John Gay both worked closely with Pope and yet remained independent: Parnell published his Miltonic poems chiefly in miscellanies, and Gay became the king of burlesque. Barbs flew back and forth between the Whig and Tory parties, the deadliest of which was Pope’s portrait of Addison in Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot (1735).

These quarrels among writers —not only about political issues, but also due to discordant feelings about writers without scruples who worked for corrupt patrons— are reflected, as mentioned by Willardson, in Alexander Pope’s ‘An Epi...

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..., and C. E. Preston. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. London: Penguin, 1999.

> Willardson Engar, Ann. ‘English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century.’ Critical Survey of Poetry, Second Revised Edition. Salem Press, 2003. eNotes.com. 2006. 23 Nov, 2009 english-poetry-eighteenth-century> > Stuprich, Michael. ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.’ Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition. Salem Press, 2002. eNotes.com. 2006. 23 Nov, 2009 epistle-dr-arbuthnot> SECONDARY SOURCES:

> Lecture notes in Emily O’Flaherty’s subject Poetry Before 1800. (National University of Ireland, Galway. 2009)

> Lecture notes in María Isabel Calderón’s subject Literatura Inglesa: Introducción a los Estudios Literarios. (Universidad de Cádiz. 2006)