Notes from the Norton Anthology

The age of great prose put a burden on its poets. Many of the generation of talented

young poets who emerged about the time of Pope’s death, a group that includes
William Collins, Thomas Gray, Mark Akenside, and the brothers Thomas and Joseph
Warton, are haunted by the fear that the spirit of poetry may have passed away –
driven out by the spirit of prose, by an ideal of mere ‘correctness’, by the end of
superstitions that had once peopled the landscape with fairies and demons, the
stuff of poetry.
Indeed more and more poetry itself was associated with melancholy, a sweet sadness,
a yearning for another time and place. The idea of the poet was changing from that
of a maker to that of an introspective , brooding confessor; the materials of poetry
were becoming rather the inner life and private vision of the poet than public, social
affairs.
Poets who brood in silence are never far from thoughts of death, and an often morbid
fascination with death, suicide and the grave preoccupies the poets of mid-century.
