ABSTRACT
Thomas Holcroft is known primarily as a polemical novelist and secondarily as a moderately successful playwright. Holcroft interrupts psychological exposition with manifesto-like poems that threaten to splinter or parody the progressive ideals espoused by his confessional narrators. When Holcroft uses the term "cobbler" specifically, it tends to be as a metonym for the tragicomic ambitions of the vulgar. Holcroft is defiantly "modern" in just the sense Pope derides but he also resists Romantic conceptions of sublimity and genius. Poetry seems to have fascinated him most as a deflationary enterprise - one that sets out to humble, rather than to exalt, cherished ideals in art and learning. Holcroft's poetry treats the rise of a person like Dolly as a matter of ironic inversion, creditable to Fortune's wheel or perhaps to the quasi-magical force described in Philosophers nos. 10 and 11 as that which makes "coblers kings, and king's coblers".
