Stephen Duck was a Wiltshire farmhand whose improbable talent for writing verses fascinated a public that fed regularly on wonders. His freakish literary bent caught the interest of powerful patrons and made him a royal favorite, a popular marvel, and finally a dignified clergyman before his puzzling suicide at the height of his career. This fairy-tale transformation started a trend in patronage by encouraging an assortment of other working-class poets and at the same time excited the scorn of the age's most mordant satirists. With few exceptions the appeal of Duck's poetry is less compelling than the paradoxes of his life. By placing him under an impossible obligation, his good fortune probably scotched the modest ability it should have nurtured. As his public image became a totem of natural virtue available to both friends and detractors for extraliterary purposes, the prodigy was effectively shunted to the margin of...