Was Addison a Poet?

Abstract

This chapter provides an account of Addison’s poetic career—the first such account since the nineteenth century—and confronts the question of why, although Addison wrote several of the most influential and highly regarded poems of the entire eighteenth century, he is so rarely thought of as a poet. The first half of the chapter traces our received image of Addison as an inherently unpoetic figure back to Joseph Warton and the advent of ‘pre-Romantic’ aesthetics in the 1740s, before examining a number of Addison’s poems, particularly from marginalized areas of his verse canon including his neo-Latin pieces and others circulated only in manuscript, which challenge that image. The second half of the chapter explores Addison’s own reluctance to inhabit the role of poet, evident in particular in his serial uses in his verse of the classical trope of ‘recusatio’ (refusal to write a poem). Through detailed analyses of his major poems—especially A Letter from Italy and ‘Milton’s Stile Imitated’, a diptych reflecting the process of self-reassessment he went through while travelling in Italy, the land of poetry, in 1701—it argues that Addison’s serious misgivings about poetry were the making of him as a poet. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of The Campaign (1705), suggesting that Addison’s most famous poem in fact represents not the climax of his career as a poet but its epilogue; by the time he wrote it, Addison had ceased to consider it even a possibility that his future might lie in poetry, and so could versify with detached fluency.