Laurel · Every poet, by period

Augustan and eighteenth century

1700–1800 · 44 poets · 112,050 lines

The eighteenth century made the heroic couplet the instrument of everything: epic translation, satire, philosophy, description. Pope perfected it, and in The Rape of the Lock made a mock epic out of a stolen curl; Crabbe turned it on the countryside as it actually was; Wheatley, enslaved in a Boston household, used it to claim the tradition as her own. Gray put the grand style to work in a country churchyard, in quatrains, and Cowper wrote The Task, his poem of country life, in blank verse.

The end of the century turned against the couplet's balance. Burns wrote in Scots, in the old song metres and the 'standard Habbie' stanza, about mice, lice, whisky and love, and was read in Edinburgh and London as a marvel. The measures on this site show the century's discipline: of all the periods here it has the lowest share of run-on lines, which is what a closed couplet is for.

  1. Robert Burns 1759–1796Poems and Songs
  2. Alexander Pope 1688–1744The Rape of the Lock
  3. Thomas Gray 1716–1771Poems
  4. William Collins 1721–1759Poetical Works
  5. Thomas Chatterton 1752–1770The Rowley Poems
  6. Phillis Wheatley 1753–1784Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
  7. Philip Freneau 1752–1832Poems
  8. William Cowper 1731–1800The Task
  9. George Crabbe 1754–1832The Village
  10. Charles Churchill 1731–1764Poetical Works
  11. Jonathan Swift 1667–1745Poems, Volume II
  12. Edward Young 1683–1765The Poetical Works, Volume II
  13. Mark Akenside 1721–1770The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside
  14. James Beattie 1735–1803The Minstrel and Other Poems
  15. Thomas Percy 1729–1811Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Volume I
  16. Oliver Goldsmith 1730–1774Poems
  17. Anna Seward 1742–1809Original Sonnets on Various Subjects
  18. Anne Killigrew 1660–1685Poems (1686)
  19. Evan Evans 1731–1788Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards
  20. James Macpherson 1736–1796Fragments of Ancient Poetry
  21. Ebenezer Cooke 1667–1732The Sot-weed Factor
  22. Matthew Prior 1664–1721Poems
  23. Christopher Smart 1722–1770Poems
  24. Isaac Watts 1674–1748Poems
  25. Henry Carey 1693–1743Poems
  26. James Thomson 1700–1748Poems
  27. Henry Rowe 1750–1819Poems
  28. Robert Cunninghame-graham of Gartmore 1735–1797Poems
  29. Allan Ramsay 1686–1758Poems
  30. Anna Lætitia Barbauld 1743–1825Poems
  31. Isobel Pagan 1740–1821Poems
  32. John Logan 1748–1788Poems
  33. Jane Elliot 1727–1805Poems
  34. William Congreve 1670–1729Poems
  35. Joseph Addison 1672–1719Poems
  36. George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe 1691–1762Poems
  37. William Broome 1745Poems
  38. George Lyttelton, Lord Lyttelton 1709–1773Poems
  39. William Walsh 1663–1708Poems
  40. Tobias George Smollett 1721–1771Poems
  41. Thomas Parnell 1679–1718Poems
  42. Charles Webbe 1678Poems
  43. John Cutts, Lord Cutts 1661–1707Poems
  44. William Oldys 1687–1761Poems

The periods are the ones the history track uses; a poet named in a period's own list belongs to it whatever the dates say.