Samuel Johnson never resolved his ambivalence to poetry, repeatedly evinced in his poems and criticism over a career spanning almost fifty years. Exquisitely sensitive to the medium, Johnson could be jarred by metrical irregularities, delighted by rhetorical grace, and gripped and enchained by imaginative power – what he tellingly calls “the force of poetry” (Works, 5:127) – such as when, as a boy, “he suddenly hurried upstairs to the street door that he might see people about him” after reading the ghost scene in Hamlet (Miscellanies, 1:158).

Exaltation and contempt

Poetry perplexed and divided Johnson. It could be the noblest of arts: “Rhetoric and Poetry,” as he observed in the preface to The Preceptor, “supply Life with its highest intellectual Pleasures; and in the hands of Virtue are of great Use for the Impression of just Sentiments and illustrious Examples” (Prefaces & Dedications, p. 183). In the Life of Milton, the great lexicographer loftily defined poetry as “the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason” (Lives, 1:282). And in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson explained how the best poetry could “instruct by pleasing,” whetting and sating “that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life” by “exciting restless and unquenchable curiosity, and compelling him that reads [it] to read it through” (Works, 7:67, 83; 16:118).