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Series Two:Essays on Poetry
No. 2
Samuel Wesley'sEpistle to a Friend concerning Poetry (1700)and theEssay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697)
With an Introduction by
Edward N. Hooker
The Augustan Reprint SocietyJanuary, 1947Price: 75c
GENERAL EDITORS: Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor; Edward N. Hooker, H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of
California, Los Angeles 24, California.
Membership in the Augustan Reprint Society entitles the subscriber to sixpublications issued each year. The annual membership fee is $2.50. Addresssubscriptions and communications to the Augustan Reprint Society, in careof one of the General Editors.
EDITORIAL ADVISORS: Louis I. Bredvold, University of Michigan;James L. Clifford, Columbia University; Benjamin Boyce,University of Nebraska; Cleanth Brooks, Louisiana State University;Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago; James R. Sutherland,Queen Mary College, University of London; Emmett L. Avery, StateCollege of Washington; Samuel Monk, Southwestern University.
Lithoprinted from Author's TypescriptEDWARDS BROTHERS, INC.LithoprintersANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN1947
We remember Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), if at all, as the father of a greatreligious leader. In his own time he was known to many as a poet and awriter of controversial prose. His poetic career began in 1685 with thepublication of Maggots, a collection of juvenile verses on trivialsubjects, the preface to which, a frothy concoction, apologizes to thereader because the book is neither grave nor gay. The first poem, "On aMaggot," is composed in hudibrastics, with a diction obviously Butlerian,and it is followed by facetious poetic dialogues and by Pindarics of theCowleian sort but on such subjects as "On the Grunting of a Hog." In 1688Wesley took his B.A. at Exeter College, Oxford, following which he becamea naval chaplain and, in 1690, rector of South Ormsby; he became rector ofEpworth in 1695. During the run of the Athenian Gazette (1691-1697)he joined with Richard Sault and John Norris in assisting John Dunton, thepromoter of the undertaking. His second venture in poetry, the Life ofOur Blessed Lord and Saviour, an epic largely in heroic couplets witha prefatory discourse on heroic poetry, appeared in 1693, was reissued in1694, and was honored with a second edition in 1697. In 1695 he dutifullycame forward with Elegies, lamenting the deaths of Queen Mary andArchbishop Tillotson. An Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry(1700) was followed by at least four other volumes of verse, the last ofwhich was issued in 1717. His poetry appears to have had readers on acertain level, but it stirred up little pleasure among wits, writers, orcritics. Judith Drake confessed that she was lulled to sleep byBlackmore's Prince Arthur and by Wesley's "heroics" (Essay inDefence of the Female Sex, 1696, p. 50). And he was satirized as amare poetaster in Garth's Dispensary, in Swift's The Battle ofthe Books, and in the earliest issues of the Dunciad. Nobodytoday would care to defend his poetry for its esthetic merits.
For a few years in the early eighteenth century Wesley found himself inthe vortex of controversy. Brought u