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Joseph Warton
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Illustration of "The Lamb" from "Songs of Innocence" by William Blake, 1879. poem; poetry
A Study of Poetry
4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) only confirmed photograph of Emily Dickinson. 1978 scan of a Daguerreotype. ca. 1847; in the Amherst College Archives. American poet. See Notes:
Poetry: First Lines
Quick Facts
Baptized:
April 22, 1722, Dunsfold, Surrey, Eng.
Died:
Feb. 23, 1800, Wickham, Hampshire
Notable Family Members:
brother Thomas Warton, the Younger
Subjects Of Study:
poetry
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Joseph Warton

English author
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History

Joseph Warton (baptized April 22, 1722, Dunsfold, Surrey, Eng.—died Feb. 23, 1800, Wickham, Hampshire) was an English critic and classical scholar who anticipated some of the critical tenets of Romanticism. His brother Thomas was poet laureate from 1785 to 1790.

Warton was impatient with some aspects of Neoclassical poetry, as is shown by his poem The Enthusiast; or the Lover of Nature (1744). His Odes on Various Subjects (1746) was an attempt to emphasize the role of imagination in verse. This was followed in 1756 by the first part of the Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. Its most striking feature is its insistence on the sublime and pathetic as the highest kinds of poetry and on the importance of originality and freedom from rules. Ethical, didactic, or satiric poetry, such as that of Pope, was considered to be of a second and inferior order.

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