ABSTRACT
The successful Restoration and earlier eighteenth-century poems typically call for close scrutiny of allusions, ironies, and shades of tone. The prospect mode, which contributes both the topographical poem and the comprehensive satire, also treats the poet as spectator of either physical nature or despairingly social nature. The most social kind of poetry, in audience if not in origin, is satire, and satire on poetry itself brings to public view the public's expectations about an artist's role. The Satires of 'Porcupinus Pelagius' include 'The Porcupinade', a blank verse, rambling, stream-of-consciousness parody of the sublime poem. If Pope's Horatian poems demand that the poet act as a citizen, the two versions of the Dunciad demand that citizens, Pope's readers, take poetry seriously as a bearer of central cultural values. Poets who did differ from Churchill and the 'times' satirists were likely to be well-to-do amateurs living outside London: William Shenstone, Richard Graves, Richard Owen Cambridge, Christopher Anstey.
