The London booksellers were anxious to drive out of the market an Edinburgh reprint of the Englishpoets and to protect their own copyright; and, besides producing an edition superior in accuracy and elegance, they determined to add biographical prefaces by some writer of authority.
When he found the complete series labelled “Johnson’s Poets,” he was moved to write on a scrap of paper which has happily been preserved: “It is great impudence to put Johnson’s Poets on the back of books which Johnson neither recommended nor revised.” Of the fifty-two poets, five, at most, were included on his suggestion.
The poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, besides affording him ample scope for expounding his views on poetry, possessed for him the personal interest which was always a stimulus to his criticism.
Over this period, Englishpoets have written some of the most enduring poems in European culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe.
English Renaissance poetry after the Elizabethan poetry can be seen as belonging to one of three strains; the Metaphysical poets, the Cavalier poets and the school of Spenser.
The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil.
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