On March 29, 1777, the night before Easter, Samuel Johnson wrote an apologetic note in his diary: “I treated with the booksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long.” By custom, Johnson set aside Easter Eve for meditation, weighing up his achievements and failures over the past year; doing any business that day seemed, to his painfully active conscience, a kind of offense against both piety and self-discipline. But at least, he reassured himself, it did not take too much time for him to agree to the proposal that the booksellers had brought him: to write brief prefaces for a new edition of English poets.

By 1777, Samuel Johnson was indeed the top brand name in British publishing.

The three men who visited Johnson that day were emissaries from a much larger group of London publishers. To produce “Works of the English Poets,” a series of fifty-six volumes that promised to include all the important English poets since the Restoration, no fewer than forty-two booksellers had joined forces. Their motives, as a lifelong professional writer like Johnson knew perfectly well, were less literary than commercial. In a manner that would be familiar to today’s record companies and movie studios, the London publishers had been deeply alarmed by a new threat to their traditional monopoly on a valuable species of intellectual property.

Thanks to vaguely interpreted copyright laws and informal collusion, the capital’s booksellers had long enjoyed the sole right to publish the most popular English poets. But in 1777, an enterprising young Scottish bookseller, John Bell, announced his own edition of “The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill.” This challenge sent the London cartel into immediate action. As one of their number, Edward Dilly, wrote to James Boswell, “the idea of an invasion of what we call our Literary Property” provoked the Londoners to announce their competing edition, which would be more “elegant and accurate” than the piratical Bell’s. But the real added value, the feature that would make the London edition more authoritative than the Edinburgh edition, was Samuel Johnson. “A concise account of the life of each author, by Dr. Johnson,” Dilly explained, “will be a very valuable addition, and stamp the reputation of this edition superior to any thing that is gone before.”

By 1777, Samuel Johnson was indeed the top brand name in British publishing. His Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare—not to mention his poems, essays, reviews, novels, and biographies—had established the sixty-eight-year-old Johnson as the chief living authority on English literature. What’s more, he was known for his interest in biography as a genre, and in the biographies of English writers in particular. “Those who lived most in intimacy with him,” Boswell would write in the Life of Johnson, “heard him upon all occasions, when there was a proper opportunity, take delight in expatiating upon the various merits of the English Poets; upon the niceties of their characters, and the events of their progress through the world which they contributed to illuminate. His mind was so full of that kind of information, and it was so well arranged in his memory, that in performing what he had undertaken … he had little more to do than to put his thoughts upon paper; exhibiting first each Poet’s life, and then subjoining a critical examination of his genius and works.”

But as Johnson knew from long experience, publishers’ plans and writers’ passions tend to run on different schedules. The booksellers wanted to rush their edition to market, to fight off Bell’s challenge. But as with his Dictionary and his Shakespeare, Johnson found the prefaces slowing and growing under his pen. Brief introductions would do for the minor poets in the edition—poets like Yalden and Tickell, whose names are almost never mentioned today except in connection with Johnson. But for the major poets—especially Milton, Dryden, Cowley, and Pope—Johnson’s ambitions grew. Indeed, Johnson took so long writing his prefaces that the publishers could no longer wait to include them with the volumes of poetry, as originally planned. The prefaces were finally published separately, in ten volumes available, at first, only to subscribers to the whole edition of the Poets. In 1781, when Johnson’s introductions were complete, they were finally issued, in four freestanding volumes, under the name by which they are still known: “The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on Their Works.” The title recognized what Johnson’s work had become: not mere prefaces, and not just masterpieces of biography, but an epochal work of literary criticism.

As Johnson knew from long experience, publishers’ plans and writers’ passions tend to run on different schedules.

The majestic new Oxford edition of Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” edited by the eminent eighteenth-century scholar Roger Lonsdale, testifies to the rarity of what Johnson achieved.¹This is literary criticism as valuable, as deserving of annotation and emendation, as the poetry it criticizes. It has been a surprisingly long time since the last scholarly edition of the Lives, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, appeared in 1905; but the intervening century has done nothing to diminish the interest of Johnson’s work. On the contrary: the first half of the twentieth century was a golden age of poetry criticism, transforming our expectations of both poetry and criticism in ways that only make Johnson more provocative. This new, four-volume edition of the Lives helps to situate Johnson’s work in a broader and deeper eighteenth-century context than ever before, shedding light on every facet of their composition and reception. But those lucky enough to own this expensive edition, or at least to study it in a library, will find that reading Johnson in a twenty-first century context is just as important and fruitful.

The pleasures offered by Johnson’s Lives are many. To begin with, there are the anecdotes he collects from literary history and London gossip, stories that helped to shape the way posterity imagined these poets. We see Addison, the poet-politician, unable to write the letter to King George I informing him of his accession to the throne, so conscious is he of the literary demands of the historic occasion—a perfect emblem of what Johnson sees as Addison’s damaging concern with propriety. We see Swift, when visited by friends who had already eaten dinner, calculating the value of the food he didn’t have to serve and insisting on paying his guests the equivalent in cash—a remarkable demonstration of his ruling passions, cheapness and pride.

Even the writers whose works we care about less offer windows on the literary culture of the eighteenth century, so enviable for its sociability and sharpness. When James Thomson made the mistake of writing a play that contained the unfortunate line “O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O,” Johnson recounts, he was followed around town by catcalls of “O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, O!” The stage, in fact, seems to have made many poets forget their dignity: Nicholas Rowe “is said to have sat in the house laughing with great vehemence, whenever he had, in his own opinion, produced a jest.”

As important as the stories Johnson has to tell, however, is the prose he uses to tell them. “He that has once studiously formed a style,” he observes in the “Life of Pope,” “rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.” But while his own style is never casual, he inhabits it with such confidence that his elaborate periods and weighted antitheses make formality itself feel natural. Take, for instance, his summary of the poets he was the first to name “Metaphysical”: “Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.” This balancing of clauses, with its symmetry and solidity, embodies its own reproach to the eccentricities of Cowley and Cleveland. Over the hundreds of pages of the Lives, such balance becomes more than a syntactical principle: it shows the deep constitution of Johnson’s mind, and helps to explain the high value he places on balance, moral and aesthetic, in the poems he discusses.

How is it that Johnson, universally recognized as one of the best English critics, so often seems to us to go wrong?

What makes the Lives of the Poets so fascinating as criticism, however, is the deep unease that Johnson’s classicizing principles inspire. No reader of the Lives can long avoid the discomfiting suspicion that Johnson’s judgment, in very many cases, cannot be trusted. The most notorious example is his verdict on “Lycidas,” one of the most musically and rhythmically exciting poems in the language: “Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known the author.” But that is only the beginning. When Johnson writes that the Metaphysical poets are “not successful in representing or moving the affections,” we think of Donne’s “Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” or “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” When he says that “Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical,” we think of Herbert’s “The Collar.” When he declares that “the fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours,” we remember that, within thirty years of Johnson’s death in 1784, Wordsworth and Keats were writing their sonnets.

How is it that Johnson, universally recognized as one of the best English critics, so often seems to us to go wrong? To answer that question, it helps to start by looking not at the poems Johnson condemns, but at those he praises. At one pivotal moment in the Lives, he quotes a passage to illustrate his idea of what poetry should be. It comes, surprisingly, not in the “Life of Dryden” or “Life of Pope,” the poets whom Johnson praises most highly, but in the “Life of Congreve,” the playwright remembered less for his poetic style than his scandalous wit. Yet “if I were required to select from the whole mass of English poetry the most poetical paragraph,” Johnson avers, “I know not what I could prefer to an exclamation in the ‘Mourning Bride’”:

These are lines that few readers today would even find interesting. But they are so consistent, in their sentiments and construction, that it is easy to see what Johnson must have admired in them. There is the subject, a Gothic ruin made venerable by age and frightening by solitude; there is the emotion, a sacramental “awe and terror”; there is the diction, full of straightforwardly emotive words like “reverend,” “steadfast,” “monumental.” Such lugubrious stateliness and pious humility speak powerfully to a reader like Johnson, who found a kind of intellectual balm in the posture of religious passivity. One of the recurrent gestures of the Lives is his irritable reproach of poets who trespass on religion proper, a subject Johnson finds too awful, in the original sense, to admit of poetic treatment. As he says in the “Life of Waller,” in a sentence utterly characteristic in both form and content: “Omnipotence cannot be exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; Perfection cannot be improved.” Congreve’s lines, however, offer an attractively religious sentiment without any objectionably sacred content.

The terms in which Johnson himself praises the passage are highly significant: the reader, he claims, “feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility.” In this particular case, “what he remembers to have felt before” is clearly a religious emotion; long before the Romantics were thought of, Congreve’s lines exemplified T. E. Hulme’s definition of Romanticism as “spilled religion.” But the principle Johnson enunciates has many other applications in his criticism. Poetry, for him, is not meant to discover something new, an experience or a truth we had never previously encountered. Instead, it uses a fixed set of aesthetic strategies to make familiar experiences and ideas, things we “remember” and “have felt before,” appear newly vital and interesting.

This principle helps to account for Johnson’s usual vocabulary of praise and censure. When he approves of a poem, he tends to imagine the poet applying beauty, cosmetic-like, to the surfaces of the subject. Of Milton’s “Comus” he writes, “A work more truly poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets, embellish almost every period with lavish decoration.” Conversely, in the “Life of Cowley,” the Metaphysical poets earn his disapproval because “They were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their thoughts.” Embellish, decorate, clothe, adorn: the good poet, in Johnson’s telling, is truth’s tailor, draping the lavish garments of verse on the otherwise naked body of thought.

It is this conception of poetry, more than Johnson’s piety or his politics, that opens a gulf between the Lives of the Poets and the twenty-first-century reader of poetry. If there is one essential principle of modern poetry, one commitment that has been sustained from Wordsworth to Eliot to the present day, it is that poetry is the pioneer of consciousness. What the poet experiences in and through his poetry is the most authentic, the most trustworthy kind of experience. Poetic thinking discovers truths to which logical thought is blind; poetic language reflects realities that ordinary speech, or mathematical formulae, cannot capture. As F. R. Leavis put it, “language is essentially heuristic … in major creative writers it does unprecedented things, advances the frontiers of the known, and discovers the new.”

Embellish, decorate, clothe, adorn: the good poet, in Johnson’s telling, is truth’s tailor.

For Johnson, however, poetry must not attempt to discover the new, for the good neoclassical reason that everything worth knowing is already known. “Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.” It follows that, as with the Metaphysical poets, “whatever is improper or vicious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange.” Innovations in form Johnson finds especially frivolous: any departure from the heroic couplet, however slight, earns his grave disapproval. Not just Gray’s Pindaric Odes and Milton’s blank verse, but even triplets and Alexandrines—even Prior’s “extending the sense from one couplet to another with variety of pauses”—strike him as perverse. In “Life” after “Life,” he insists that the only proper form for English poetry was established in the late seventeenth century: Dryden, he writes, achieved “the completion of our metre.”

Today, in an age of formal laissez-faire, Johnson’s absolute certainty about how a poem should look and sound has a certain appeal. But the Lives of the Poets reminds us that the only power able to fix the form and matter of poetry once and for all is death; and indeed, Johnson’s critical masterpiece represents the embalming of the neoclassical aesthetic. The farther one reads in the Lives, in fact, the more it appears that Johnson himself suspected this. One of the striking features of the Lives is the critic’s frequent impatience with his own precepts, a nervous irritation that surfaces in surprising ways. Johnson praises many poets for their “correctness” of form and diction, for instance, but always with a certain contempt. Addison may be “one of our earliest examples of correctness,” yet if he was “too judicious to commit faults,” Johnson knows that he was also “not sufficiently vigorous to attain excellence.” Waller was “rather smooth than strong”; Prior’s “praise will be that of correctness and industry, rather than of compass of comprehension or activity of fancy.”

The most striking example of Johnson’s divided mind is his practically schizophrenic treatment of Paradise Lost. After his dutiful, pious praise of Milton’s virtues—“sanctity of thought,” “gigantic loftiness”—Johnson unexpectedly swerves into the most damning objections, building to a verdict that Milton’s poem has never been able to expunge: “The want of human interest is always felt. ‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.”

Between this lethally effective dismissal and Johnson’s conventional conclusion, that Paradise Lost is “not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first,” there seems to run a fault line charged with new values, new discriminations, new ambitions for poetry. Less than twenty years after the Lives of the Poets came Lyrical Ballads, whose seismic energy opened that fault line into a chasm—the chasm of modernity, from whose far side we continue to read Johnson’s masterpiece, never denying its power and delight, never forgetting its distance.