‘Perpetually a Poet'

This chapter begins by taking up Boswell’s aside that a poetical sensibility pervades all the literary productions of Johnson. This chapter cites passages from the ‘Life of Dryden’, the Preface to Shakespeare and Rasselas , setting the scene for surveying both the grandest and most intimate of Johnson’s poetical achievements. Given the scale of attention accorded to the great Juvenalian imitations, other parts of the oeuvre have seemed overshadowed, including Johnson’s life-long devotion to translation and the lighter ‘social’ verse. At its centre, this chapter foregrounds a sequence of poems, beginning with Johnson’s ‘To Mrs. Thrale, On Her Completing Her Thirty-Fifth Year’ (1777). After Johnson’s death, Mrs. Thrale included these impromptu verses in the manuscript letter that she sent to her daughter Sophia who replied in a similar metrical mode that is published here for the first time. Collaborative examples of Johnson’s poetry are then discussed followed by commentary on the Latin verse. As performances that resist both his own melancholy and the effects that contemporary trends were beginning to exert on English poetry, this chapter concludes with a call for a return of Johnson’s lighter verses to the attention of a ‘common reader’.