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William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th-century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet", whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem Yardley-Oak.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1788.
James Beattie was a Scottish poet, moralist, and philosopher.
Anna Seward was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield. She benefited from her father's progressive views on female education.
Mary Robinson was an English actress, poet, dramatist, novelist, and celebrity figure. She lived in England, in the cities of Bristol and London; she also lived for a time in France and Germany. She enjoyed poetry from the age of seven and started working, first as a teacher and then as actress, from the age of fourteen. She wrote many plays, poems and novels. She was a celebrity, gossiped about in newspapers, famous for her acting and writing. During her lifetime she was known as "the English Sappho". She earned her nickname "Perdita" for her role as Perdita in 1779. She was the first public mistress of King George IV while he was still Prince of Wales.
The Gentleman's Magazine was a monthly magazine founded in London, England, by Edward Cave in January 1731. It ran uninterrupted for almost 200 years, until 1922. It was the first to use the term magazine for a periodical. Samuel Johnson's first regular employment as a writer was with The Gentleman's Magazine.
Ottobah Cugoano, also known as John Stuart, was a abolitionist, political activist and natural rights philosopher from West Africa who was active in Britain in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Captured in the Gold Coast and sold into slavery at the age of 13, he was shipped to Grenada in the West Indies. In 1772 he was purchased by a merchant who took him to England, where he learnt to read and write, and was freed. Later working for artists Richard and Maria Cosway, he became acquainted with several British political and cultural figures. He joined the Sons of Africa, a group of African abolitionists in Britain.
Helen Maria Williams was a British novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. A religious dissenter, she was a supporter of abolitionism and of the ideals of the French Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror, but nonetheless spent much of the rest of her life in France.
Jane West, who published as Prudentia Homespun and Mrs. West, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and writer of conduct literature and educational tracts.
The Della Cruscans were a circle of European late-18th-century sentimental poets founded by Robert Merry (1755–98).
Ann Yearsley, née Cromartie, was an English poet and writer from a lowly social background. The poet Robert Southey wrote a biography of her.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Mary Scott (1751/52–1793), married name Mary Taylor, was an English poet, born in Milborne Port, Somerset.
Lessons for Children is a series of four age-adapted reading primers written by the prominent 18th-century British poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Published in 1778 and 1779, the books initiated a revolution in children's literature in the Anglo-American world. For the first time, the needs of the child reader were seriously considered: the typographically simple texts progress in difficulty as the child learns. In perhaps the first demonstration of experiential pedagogy in Anglo-American children's literature, Barbauld's books use a conversational style, which depicts a mother and her son discussing the natural world. Based on the educational theories of John Locke, Barbauld's books emphasise learning through the senses.
The Botanic Garden (1791) is a set of two poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants, by the British poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin. The Economy of Vegetation celebrates technological innovation, scientific discovery and offers theories concerning contemporary scientific questions, such as the history of the cosmos. The more popular Loves of the Plants promotes, revises and illustrates Linnaeus's classification scheme for plants.
The Task: A Poem, in Six Books is a poem in blank verse by William Cowper published in 1785, usually seen as his supreme achievement. Its six books are called "The Sofa", "The Timepiece", "The Garden", "The Winter Evening", "The Winter Morning Walk" and "The Winter Walk at Noon". Beginning with a mock-Miltonic passage on the origins of the sofa, it develops into a discursive meditation on the blessings of nature, the retired life and religious faith, with attacks on slavery, blood sports, fashionable frivolity, lukewarm clergy and French despotism among other things. Cowper's subjects are those that occur to him naturally in the course of his reflections rather than being suggested by poetic convention, and the diction throughout is, for an 18th-century poem, unusually conversational and unartificial. As the poet himself writes,
Elizabeth Hands was an English poet.
A miscellany is a collection of various pieces of writing by different authors. Meaning a mixture, medley, or assortment, a miscellany can include pieces on many subjects and in a variety of different forms. In contrast to anthologies, whose aim is to give a selective and canonical view of literature, miscellanies were produced for the entertainment of a contemporary audience and so instead emphasise collectiveness and popularity. Laura Mandell and Rita Raley state:
This last distinction is quite often visible in the basic categorical differences between anthologies on the one hand, and all other types of collections on the other, for it is in the one that we read poems of excellence, the "best of English poetry," and it is in the other that we read poems of interest. Out of the differences between a principle of selection and a principle of collection, then, comes a difference in aesthetic value, which is precisely what is at issue in the debates over the "proper" material for inclusion into the canon.
Maria De Fleury was a London Baptist poet, hymnist and polemicist descended from French Huguenots. Little is known of her private life. The dating of her birth at 1754 and her death at 1794 are conjectural.
References
- ↑ Janet M. Todd, ed. (1987), A Dictionary of British and American women writers, 1660–1800. Rowman & Allanheld. ISBN 978-0-8476-7125-0.
- 1 2 3 4 Lonsdale, Roger (ed) (1990). Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology. Oxford University Press. pp. 451, 536. ISBN 0192827758.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
- 1 2 3 Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy: The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Batsford, 1990), pp. 353.