By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The eighteenth century was the great Age of Enlightenment, but also Romanticism. The Augustan or neoclassical poetry of Alexander Pope and others eventually gave way to the Romantic meditations of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Below, we introduce ten of the greatest and most emblematic poems of the eighteenth century. We’ve confined ourselves to poems written in the English language here, to make the task even vaguely achievable.