The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson

First published: 1779–81, as Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets; revised edition 1781, as The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

Type of work: Biography and literary criticism

The Work

The essays contained in Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets were composed as prefaces to a large collection of the works of English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they are therefore primarily critical rather than biographical. Johnson related the known information about the lives of his subjects, but he was content to rely on facts gathered by earlier biographers, reserving his original thoughts for his critical commentary.

The more than fifty essays vary greatly in both length and detail. Johnson wrote extensive studies of men such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Milton, and Jonathan Swift, whereas he only briefly summarized the achievements of minor figures whose names subsequently vanished from all but the pages of detailed literary histories. It is a tribute to the soundness of Johnson’s judgment that the writers whom he considered important are those whose works continue to be highly regarded.

The collection is among Johnson’s best, most readable works. The language he uses is characteristically stately, but his style is less formal than in some of his earlier writing. He occasionally departs from the easy narrative flow to offer a striking rhetorical passage in which balanced phrases and carefully constructed comparisons make his critical judgments memorable. One of his most famous “set pieces” is his contrast of the writings of Dryden and Pope:

The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind, Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden’s page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope’s is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.

Most of the essays in The Lives of the Poets follow the same structural pattern. Johnson begins with an account of his subject’s family and education, then summarizes the main events of his life and gives brief notes on the times and circumstances of the composition and publication of his major works. The biography concludes with critical commentary on specific poems and a final assessment of the poet’s literary talents and faults.

Johnson’s moral and literary standards formed a strong foundation for all his writings, and both the biographical and the critical portions of The Lives of the Poets reveal their author’s characteristic point of view. The biographical sketch of a popular Restoration dramatist, for example, begins with this statement: “Of Thomas Otway, one of the first names in the English drama, little is known; nor is there any part of that little which his biographer can take pleasure in relating.”

The characters and personalities of the poets were far more interesting to Johnson than facts and dates. He had begun his career as a biographer with a searching study of the motives that shaped the life of his friend Richard Savage, and in The Lives of the Poets, he often manages to convey the essential qualities of a subject in a few words. Writing of the charming, if somewhat irresponsible, author of The Beggar’s Opera (pr., pb. 1728), he notes: “[John] Gay is represented as a man easily incited to hope, and deeply depressed when his hopes were disappointed. This is not the character of a hero, but it may naturally imply something more generally welcome, a soft and civil companion.”

Johnson’s insights into the human personality are shown especially clearly in his life of Pope. He brings the brilliant, ambitious, often ailing and bad-tempered poet vividly before the reader, chiding the excessive sensitivity that made Pope viciously attack critics of his writing in satirical works such as The Dunciad (1728–43) and led him to hold grudges against his “enemies” far longer than most people thought reasonable. Johnson also comments on one of Pope’s rather amusing foibles:

In all his intercourse with mankind he had great delight in artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods. He practised his arts on such small occasions that Lady Bolingbroke used to say, in a French phrase, that “he plaid the politician about cabbages and turnips.”

Johnson points out Pope’s more appealing characteristics as well, noting his loyalty to his friends and his respect and tenderness for his elderly parents, and he tries to suggest something of the state of mind brought about by Pope’s physical disabilities, his small stature, his weakness, and his almost constant pain.

Although The Lives of the Poets reveals Johnson as a skillful analyst of the human personality, the book is still more interesting as a work of theoretical and practical criticism. His essay on the life of Abraham Cowley contains a famous discussion of metaphysical poetry in which Johnson defines the wit that was the essence of the technique of John Donne and his followers: “Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.”

Johnson, who believed that great poetry should deal with universal thoughts in general terms, felt that the achievement of the metaphysical poets was a minor one, and he quotes many lines to illustrate the absurdities often produced by their quest for novelty. He does, however, show appreciation of their intellectual efforts and grants that they occasionally succeeded: “Yet great labor, directed by great ability, is never wholly lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage.”

The life of Milton shows Johnson at once at his worst and at his best. His natural antipathy for allegory in general and pastoral allegory in particular led to his scornful dismissal of “Lycidas,” the elegy that many consider one of the finest English lyrics:

In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.

Johnson’s succinct praise of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (both 1631) conforms more closely to later views, however: “Every man that reads them, reads them with pleasure.”

His extensive remarks on Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) are undeniably illuminating, for he recognizes and pays tribute to the epic’s greatness, majesty, unity, and powerful theological foundation; however, he also examines closely what he feels to be a major flaw. All the characters except Adam and Eve are supernatural beings, and even these two are in a situation different from that of all other men and women: “The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of the imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity or sympathy.” This comment shows clearly Johnson’s conviction that literature should be, as Aristotle had declared, an imitation of life and a reflection of the real emotions of human beings. This viewpoint led Johnson to conclude, a little reluctantly:

The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

Although Johnson’s general statements are the passages from The Lives of the Poets most often quoted, he actually devotes much of his attention to commentary on specific lines. He presents, for example, a detailed discussion of the individual stanzas of Thomas Gray’s ode “The Bard,” criticizing the poet’s excessive alliteration, his use of “the puerilities of obsolete mythology,” and the many clichés among his images.

Quotation of brief passages is especially effective in the life of Dryden, where Johnson cites many lines to illustrate the elegance and majesty as well as the pedantry and carelessness of the poet. He finds that Dryden “delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy.” Close examination of many passages leads Johnson to lament Dryden’s carelessness, although he admires his great talent:

Such is the unevenness of his composition that ten lines are seldom found together without something of which the reader is ashamed. Dryden was no rigid judge of his own pages; he seldom struggled after supreme excellence, but snatched in haste what was within his reach; and when he could content others, was himself contented.

A reading of The Lives of the Poets reveals why Johnson has become increasingly famous not only as the colorful personage immortalized by James Boswell but also as one of the best prose writers and ablest critics in English literary history. Although his many prejudices occasionally brought forth declarations that later critics came to consider absurd, his personal standards generally contributed to the lasting worth of his criticism. Johnson evaluated literature on the basis of its truth to life, and, since he understood better than most men what human beings think and feel, his judgments for the most part remain valid. He appreciated the appeal of the new and the unusual, but he reserved his highest praise for what he considered to be lastingly true and moving.

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