'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.' In the last of his major writings, Samuel Johnson looked back over the previous two centuries of English Literature in order to describe the personalities as well as the achievements of the leading English poets. The major Lives - of Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope - are memorable cameos of the life of writing in which Johnson is as attentive to human frailty as to literary prowess. The shorter Lives preserve some of Johnson's most piercing, critical judgements. Unsentimental, opinionated, and quotable, The Lives of the Poets continues to influence the reputations of the writers concerned. It is one of the greatest works of English criticism, but also one of the most humanly diverting. This selection of the Lives of ten of the most important poets draws its text from Roger Lonsdale's authoritative complete edition. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

"A beautifully organized work of scholarship, a book of exceptional learning and sympathy."--Times Literary Supplement. "Rarely does one find a new biography which merits such wholehearted praise--for thorough research using large masses of new information, for skillful use of evidence, and for a smooth, entertaining style.... One of the outstanding literary lives of our period."--Johnsonian Newsletter (Columbia University). Since his death in 1814, Charles Burney's long and remarkable career has usually been seen in the terms dictated by his idealizing daughter Fanny. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, this biography (first published in 1965) tells the story of Burney's determined climb from humble origins to celebrity as a musicologist and musical traveler, as a member of the Johnsonian circle, and as the head of an unusually talented family. This intimate study of one of the most engaging and energetic men of his age throws new light on his literary and musical career and on his acquaintance with such luminaries as Handel, Garrick, Johnson, Rousseau, and Haydn.

More than a hundred women poets of the eighteenth century are represented in this anthology. Written by duchesses, ladies, and working women, the poems speak with vigour and immediacy of the world they lived in and their experiences of town and country, love and marriage, public and private topics. In a range of moods from melancholic and resentful to the humorous and exuberant, the poets open a new perspective on their age, and provide grounds for a reassessment of a neglected aspect of its literature.

Hailed as a major event (John Carey, Sunday Times), a major anthology: one of the best that Oxford has ever produced (James Fenton, The Times), the most important anthology in recent years (The Economist), and indispensable (Kingsley Amis), Roger Lonsdales The New Oxford Book ofEighteenth-Century Verse is now available in a stylishly redesigned reissue. No previous anthology has succeeded in illustrating so thoroughly the kinds of verse actually written in the eighteenth century. The familiar tradition is fully represented by selections from such poets as Pope, Swift, Gray, Smart, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Blake. In addition, the anthology includes verse by many forgotten writers, both men and women, from all levels of society. Although they have never figured in conventional literary history, they wrote humorous, idiosyncratic, and graphic verse about their personal experience and the world around them, in a way that should challenge received ideas about the periods restraints and inhibitions.