Robert Dodsley’s
A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, in 6 volumes, 1748-58, was the most popular anthology of contemporary English poetry published during the mid-eighteenth century, dominating the market in poetical miscellanies for thirty-four years and establishing canons of “elegant and polite” taste, as Dodsley put it in the Postscript to Volume VI, for half a century. Robert Dodsley (1704-64), lionised in his youth as “the footman poet”, as well as one of England’s most successful playwrights, who at one point in the 1730s had three plays in performance on the stage at the same time (see our profile of Dodsley), had established himself as London’s most astute and respected bookseller/publisher, long before he published the
Collection, which so indisputably…
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Citation: Gordon, Ian. "A Collection of Poems by Several Hands". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 June 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16908, accessed 24 November 2024.]
