Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697)

Epistle to a Friend Concerning
Poetry (1700) and the Essay on
Heroic Poetry (second edition,
1697)

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(1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697), by
Samuel Wesley This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no
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Title: Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on
Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697)
Author: Samuel Wesley
Commentator: Edward N. Hooker
Release Date: August 10, 2005 [EBook #16506]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EPISTLE
TO A FRIEND ***

Produced by Charles M. Bidwell

Series Two: Essays on Poetry No. 2
Samuel Wesley's Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry (1700) and the
Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697)
With an Introduction by Edward N. Hooker
The Augustan Reprint Society January, 1947 _Price:_ 75c

GENERAL EDITORS: _Richard C. Boys_, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor; _Edward N. Hooker, H.T. Swedenberg, Jr._, University of
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Lithoprinted from Author's Typescript EDWARDS BROTHERS, INC.
Lithoprinters ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN 1947

INTRODUCTION
We remember Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), if at all, as the father of a
great religious leader. In his own time he was known to many as a poet
and a writer of controversial prose. His poetic career began in 1685
with the publication of Maggots, a collection of juvenile verses on

trivial subjects, the preface to which, a frothy concoction, apologizes to
the reader because the book is neither grave nor gay. The first poem,
"On a Maggot," is composed in hudibrastics, with a diction obviously
Butlerian, and it is followed by facetious poetic dialogues and by
Pindarics of the Cowleian sort but on such subjects as "On the Grunting
of a Hog." In 1688 Wesley took his B.A. at Exeter College, Oxford,
following which he became a naval chaplain and, in 1690, rector of
South Ormsby; he became rector of Epworth in 1695. During the run of
the Athenian Gazette (1691-1697) he joined with Richard Sault and
John Norris in assisting John Dunton, the promoter of the undertaking.
His second venture in poetry, the Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour,
an epic largely in heroic couplets with a prefatory discourse on heroic
poetry, appeared in 1693, was reissued in 1694, and was honored with a
second edition in 1697. In 1695 he dutifully came forward with Elegies,
lamenting the deaths of Queen Mary and Archbishop Tillotson. An
Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry (1700) was followed by at least
four other volumes of verse, the last of which was issued in 1717. His
poetry appears to have had readers on a certain level, but it stirred up
little pleasure among wits, writers, or critics. Judith Drake confessed
that she was lulled to sleep by Blackmore's Prince Arthur and by
Wesley's "heroics" (Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, 1696, p. 50).
And he was satirized as a mare poetaster in Garth's Dispensary, in
Swift's The Battle of the Books, and in the earliest issues of the Dunciad.
Nobody today would care to defend his poetry for its esthetic merits.
For a few years in the early eighteenth century Wesley found himself in
the vortex of controversy. Brought up in the dissenting tradition, he had
swerved into conformity at some point during the 1680's, possibly
under the influence of Tillotson, whom he greatly admired (cf. Epistle
to a Friend, pp. 5-6). In 1702 there appeared his Letter from a Country
Divine to his friend in London concerning the education of dissenters
in their private academies, apparently written about 1693. This attack
upon dissenting academies was published at an unfortunate time, when
the public mind was inflamed by the intolerance of overzealous
churchmen. Wesley was furiously answered; he replied in A Defence of
a Letter (1704), and again in _A Reply to Mr. Palmer's Vindication_
(1707). It is scarcely to Wesley's credit that in this quarrel he stood

shoulder to shoulder with that most hot-headed of all contemporary
bigots, Henry Sacheverell. His prominence in the controversy earned
him the