The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1

In an address to the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies at the 1983 annual meeting, Roger Lonsdale suggested that our knowledge of eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies have decided to print. For the most part modern anthologies have, in turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was essentially that of “polite taste”. The obscene, the feminine, and the political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Lonsdale is not the only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed, revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious--and useful--parlor games among academics. This is purposely to acknowledge the Obligations I owe to several Gentlemen, who have shewn their Esteem of the Merry Thought, in the large Collections they have communicated before the Holidays.