Patronage and Commercial Print in Conflict: Laurence Eusden’s Reception and Afterlife

This article considers the work, reputation, and afterlife of Laurence Eusden, an English poet laureate (1718–1730) pilloried by Alexander Pope. Eusden chiefly wrote panegyric and occasion poems, which were prominent genres of eighteenth-century poetry but have fallen out of favor with modern readers. An examination of his reputation and afterlife reveals how and why his work was so quickly devalued and suggests that public relationships to state poetic propaganda were changing in the years after 1714. This article argues that Eusden’s success and his subsequent decline in reputation exemplify the conflicts between patronage and commercial print, high and low art, and politics and poetics in early eighteenth-century Britain.