Poeta de Tristibus; Or, The Poet's Complaint

The Augustan Reprint Society

(1682)
Introduction and Notes by Harold Love
PUBLICATION NUMBER 149
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1971
GENERAL EDITORS William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles ASSOCIATE EDITOR David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles ADVISORY EDITORS Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan James L. Clifford, Columbia University Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Curt A. Zimansky, State University of Iowa CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Lilly Kurahashi, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Poeta de Tristibus: or, the Poet's Complaint (PdT) was published by two newly established booksellers, Henry Faithorne and John Kersey, early in November 1681 (title-page dated 1682). The poem is only one of a large number of Restoration satires on writers as a group, its nearest neighbors in time being the pseudo-Rochester A Session of the Poets, the anonymous Advice to Apollo, Mulgrave's An Essay upon Satyr, Otway's The Poet's Complaint , Robert Gould's To Julian, Secretary to the Muses, the anonymous Satire on the Poets, Shadwell's The Tory Poets , and Thomas Wood's Juvenalis Redivivus . It differs from these in its Hudibrastic meter, the richness of its biographical detail, and a relatively mild degree of animus against its victims, though there is quite a deal against poetry as art and trade.