Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697)

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Series Two: Essays on Poetry
No. 2
Samuel Wesley's Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697)
With an Introduction by Edward N. Hooker
The Augustan Reprint Society January, 1947 Price: 75c
GENERAL EDITORS: Richard C. Boys , University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Edward N. Hooker, H.T. Swedenberg, Jr. , University of California, Los Angeles 24, California.
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EDITORIAL ADVISORS: Louis I. Bredvold , University of Michigan; James L. Clifford , Columbia University; Benjamin Boyce , University of Nebraska; Cleanth Brooks , Louisiana State University; Arthur Friedman , University of Chicago; James R. Sutherland , Queen Mary College, University of London; Emmett L. Avery , State College of Washington; Samuel Monk , Southwestern University.
Lithoprinted from Author's Typescript EDWARDS BROTHERS, INC. Lithoprinters ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN 1947
We remember Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), if at all, as the father of a great religious leader. In his own time he was known to many as a poet and a writer of controversial prose. His poetic career began in 1685 with the publication of Maggots , a collection of juvenile verses on trivial subjects, the preface to which, a frothy concoction, apologizes to the reader because the book is neither grave nor gay. The first poem, On a Maggot, is composed in hudibrastics, with a diction obviously Butlerian, and it is followed by facetious poetic dialogues and by Pindarics of the Cowleian sort but on such subjects as On the Grunting of a Hog. In 1688 Wesley took his B.A. at Exeter College, Oxford, following which he became a naval chaplain and, in 1690, rector of South Ormsby; he became rector of Epworth in 1695. During the run of the Athenian Gazette (1691-1697) he joined with Richard Sault and John Norris in assisting John Dunton, the promoter of the undertaking. His second venture in poetry, the Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour , an epic largely in heroic couplets with a prefatory discourse on heroic poetry, appeared in 1693, was reissued in 1694, and was honored with a second edition in 1697. In 1695 he dutifully came forward with Elegies , lamenting the deaths of Queen Mary and Archbishop Tillotson. An Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry (1700) was followed by at least four other volumes of verse, the last of which was issued in 1717. His poetry appears to have had readers on a certain level, but it stirred up little pleasure among wits, writers, or critics. Judith Drake confessed that she was lulled to sleep by Blackmore's Prince Arthur and by Wesley's heroics ( Essay in Defence of the Female Sex , 1696, p. 50). And he was satirized as a mare poetaster in Garth's Dispensary , in Swift's The Battle of the Books , and in the earliest issues of the Dunciad . Nobody today would care to defend his poetry for its esthetic merits.