ABSTRACT
Poets and critics in the early eighteenth century thought of poetry as consisting of various specialized traditions called genres.1 The classical traditionalist did not sit down to write a poem; he attempted a certain kind of poem-an epic, a great ode, a satire, an elegy, an epistle, a song, or a pastoral. And he had precedent for the general procedure that each tradition or genre entailed and even for various minutiae within the general pattern; he had in addition a storehouse of apt phrases that had accumulated in the previous masterpieces of the genre chosen, and these phrases were to be treated at will as heirloom jewels to be reset and effectively used again and again. With these definitely constricting influences of tradition it was the fate of the eighteenth century to struggle. The poets whom we are now to consider believed in liberty, but in liberty within the law-and they stressed law. But they were not slaves to one tradition, and in addition to the classical genres they built for themselves various non-classical traditions, such as the burlesque (which they thought had classical warrant and which usually depended on a classical generic pattern), narratives in the manner of fabliaux, ballads, biblical narratives, hymns, descriptive topographical poems, and many others. Even in this period the classical genre was not the sole possible precedent.
