ABSTRACT
The main target of the poem is the so-called Lake school, of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. In his prefatory remarks, Mant makes it clear that his intention is the preservation of the ‘Rules’ of poetry ‘which were founded by Homer and Sophocles, and of which Virgil and Horace, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, did not disdain to be disciples’. he Simplidad is an Horatian satire in the form of a dialogue between P and F and is divided into four sections, two of which are generously represented below. Mant’s sustained attack on the Lake school is framed within the poem by a eulogy of classical poetics at the beginning and a peroration at the end that celebrates Milton, Dryden and Pope.
