ABSTRACT
Poems on Several Occasions gathers at least a decade's worth of work, including religious, philosophical, and topographical pieces, as well as many poems celebrating friends. Mary Masters' friendship with Samuel Johnson and other literati of the period cast suspicion that she was helped with the composition and presentation of the new poems in the 1755 volume. The only surviving evidence of this is Mrs. Gardiner's statement, as told to Boswell, that Johnson revised and 'illuminated' Masters' volumes 'here and there with a ray of his own genius'. Mary Astell, Catharine Trotter, and Elizabeth Rowe are singled out for their important works, and Masters includes verses in letters to 'Maria', a friend inclined to accept female inferiority, that reveal the influence these works had on her own thinking.
