Augustan Poetic Diction

This volume makes conveniently available to students and others the group of chapters in Professor Geoffrey Tillotson’s Augustan Studies in which he deals with the poetic theory and practice of the Augustan age as a whole, rather than with particular works. Augustan poetry as defined by Professor Tillotson is the ‘poetry written by most poets from Elizabethan times into the nineteenth century’ and though this may appear at first sight an inconveniently wide definition it enables the author to show that the great eighteenth-century masters who are his chief concern here are in the main course of English poetry.