Johnson’s Lives of The Poets

Dr. Johnson is our greatest critic but often wrong, not least when he knows himself right. For instance consider the opening sentence of his Preface to Shakespeare: “Nothing can please many or please long but just representations of general nature.” There is the familiar pronouncing manner, and, taking exception, you risk being tossed and gored. But he was wrong about Shakespeare, who doesn’t do general nature—never the forest, always the trees. That said, Johnson, even when we move our chairs to a distance, suddenly jerks us round. He ventures an idea or raises a question that hadn’t crossed our minds before, and we sit up straighter. That is how it is with his reading of the English poets. What he says of Dryden holds unexpectedly for himself: “With Dryden we are wandering in quest of truth, whom we find, if we find her at all, dressed in the graces of elegance; and if we miss her, the labor of the pursuit rewards itself.”

Johnson’s prefaces—i.e., the lives of the poets as distinct from their poetry—were first published in installments by a consortium of London booksellers—twenty-two lives in 1779, the remaining thirty in 1781. The ongoing Yale edition of the complete works, under the general editorship of Robert DeMaria, succeeding Frederick Hilles, who died in 1975, devotes three volumes to the Lives of the Poets (2010). The copy-text is the first edition of 1779, incorporating additions and corrections from the second (1781) and third editions (1783), and Johnson’s substantive revisions from the third edition. The notes are copious but don’t overawe the writing. It seems unlikely that this edition will ever be superseded, though scholars like to keep redoing the text the moment they are done with it; witness the glut of new editions of Shakespeare. Perhaps that is how the editors keep out of mischief.

Johnson’s agreement with the booksellers, concluded in 1777, committed him to write prefaces to the work of England’s poets “from Chaucer to the present time.” Long before the first installment came out in 1775, the undertaking had both shrunk to more practicable limits and expanded hugely, becoming a biographical and critical survey of English poetry in the hundred-year period from Abraham Cowley (d. 1667) to Thomas Gray (d. 1771). Some of the material antedates Johnson’s commission, such as the life of Richard Savage, a reprobate and the friend of his bosom. This near book-length biography is part autobiography, with Savage standing in for the author. Johnson wrote it more than thirty years earlier, but, being thrifty, recycled it later.

A number of poets who might have been included didn’t make the cut. Oliver Goldsmith was one, omitted, according to Johnson, for “some clashing of interests in the property of his works.” This is too bad, for Goldsmith is a genuine poet whom Johnson both loved and deplored. Charles Churchill, much commended by Yvor Winters and his school, but more caustic than considerable, was dropped because of personal resentment. “I called the fellow a blockhead,” said Johnson complacently, employing a favorite term of reproach, “and I will call him a blockhead still.” A few poets of real consequence mysteriously didn’t get in either—among them Crashaw, Herrick, Marvell, and Lovelace. The last had died fighting for his king, a solid credential; but the other three were problematic—one a lurid Catholic, one scatological, the third sexually ambiguous. In 1767, before he began the Lives, Johnson had met with King George iii, who suggested he write “a literary biography of this country.” Perhaps when he came to do it Johnson thought about his sovereign and winnowed the contents himself.

Having completed work on the first four volumes, he hoped (he told his diary) they were written “in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety.” That was his aim throughout his career and defines his instrumental aesthetic. Obviously he far transcended both. Elsewhere...