Newspaper Verse

A study of the popular but forgotten poetry published in eighteenth-century English newspapers and their overlooked influence on the canonical work from the period.

The first book-length study of its kind, Newspaper Verse focuses on poetry published in English-language newspapers during the long eighteenth century, including odes, couplets, news poems, ballads, and elegies by such famous poets as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  Alexander Pope, Elizabeth Carter, and Thomas Gray and also verse by lesser-known or anonymous writers. For John O’Brien, these texts constitute something like the dark matter of eighteenth-century letters: the most widely read poetry in the period and yet unincorporated into existing narratives of eighteenth-century English literature. By engaging with these forgotten poems, O’Brien demonstrates how popular media enabled poetry to thrive and recovers their rich influence on the shape of English literary history.