ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the poem The Pacificator published in February 1700. The Pacificator was an intervention in one of the most furious literary quarrels of the later 1690s. Defoe presents it in mock heroic fashion as a military combat between two armies, depicting, more or less chronologically, a succession of battles between ‘the Men of Sense’ led by Nokor (Sir Richard Blackmore), and ‘the Men of Wit’, led by Samuel Garth and other commanders. According to Defoe’s account, ‘Nokor made the first attack and threw Drammatick Wit upon its Back’. This refers to the publication in February 1695 of Blackmore’s Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem, which carried a preface deploring the immorality of the contemporary stage.
