ABSTRACT
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) Adam Smith, not yet a famous economist, expressed the following opinions as to the state of English poetry:
There is much truth in these statements, but they are not, as this chapter will show, altogether true. They rather express a common feeling as to the obsessive influence that Swift and Pope exerted. During the second quarter of the century, however, at a time when Swift and Pope were in their prime, new tendencies in poetry began to appear. These tendencies were hardly rebellious against the dominance of Swift and Pope, but they do evade the influence of those poets and of their tradition as it stemmed from Dryden and others. The developments include an increasing awareness of landscape as material for poetry, coupled, curiously enough, with an increased use of philosophical reflections in poetry. More noticeable than heretofore and parallel to the Dryden-Pope school is a Miltonic tradition, manifest metrically in the use both of blank verse and of the tetrameter couplet of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. The idiom of Milton also is increasingly cultivated.
