SOURCE: Griffin, Robert J. “The Eighteenth-Century Construction of Romanticism: Thomas Warton and the Pleasures of Melancholy.” ELH 59, no. 4 (winter 1992): 799-815.

In the following essay, Griffin explores the idea that Warton is a romantic poet by analyzing his poem The Pleasures of Melancholy.

The great merit of this writer appears to us to consist in the boldness and originality of his composition, and in the fortunate audacity with which he has carried the dominion of poetry into regions that had been considered as inaccessible to her ambition. The gradual refinement of taste had, for nearly a century, been weakening the force of original genius. Our poets had become timid and fastidious, and circumscribed themselves both in the choice and management of their subjects, by the observance of a limited number of models, who were thought to have exhausted all the legitimate resources of the art. ———was one of the...