The Poems of Samuel Johnson. Edited by David Nichol Smith
and Edward L. McAdam. (Oxford University Press. 25s.)
THIS superb volume in which for the first time Johnson's poems appear in a complete, scholarly edition, as projected but never carried out by Boswell, should be welcome to all admirers of our eighteenth-century literature. The younger poets of our time have been led back to Dryden by Mr. Eliot, and to Pope by Miss Sitwell and others, but there is still a tendency to
ignore Johnson or to treat him almost as the creation of Boswell, a great figure, a remarkable talker, but more of a literary char- acter than a poet. This is unjust. Johnson is by no means to be disposed of as a minor poet inferior to Dryden or even to Goldsmith. His is a unique, authentic voice, and his genius is evident in his poems, and not only in his prose and his con- versation. His style is more consistently weighty than Dryden's, but the vigour of his mind is such that he is rarely dull, while the unusual intensity of his passions, and the nobility of his nature, give a warmth and colour to his verse which makes it often truly poetic. A blazing sincerity informing a great talent for language is unlikely to be unproductive of poetry. If we free ourselves from the confines of the poetic convention of our day we may admire such lines as these: Friendship! pecilliar boon of heav'n, The noble mind's delight and pride, To men and angels only giv'n, To all the lower world denied ; While Love, a stranger to the blest, Parent of thousand wild desires, The human and the savage breast Inflames alike with raging fires.
His short poems have often great felicity of phrase, while his longer poems are not without an occasional grandeur. This edition in its careful editing and massive appearance is a proper monument to the great doctor.
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