SOURCE: Pittock, Joan. “Poetry Versus Good Sense: Joseph Warton and the Reaction Against Pope.” In her The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton, pp. 122-66. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.

In the following excerpt, Pittock considers Joseph Warton's poetic style, his critical theories, and his seminal work on Pope, its influence on his contemporaries, and its influence on subsequent generations of writers and literary critics.

I

In chapter i of Biographia Literaria Coleridge considers the relevance of poetry to his own development. He explicitly relates his awareness of true poetry to the work of William Lisle Bowles:¹

At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysicks, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. … This was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would, perhaps, have been destructive...