[In the following essay, Pittock examines Joseph Warton's Odes on Various Subjects, its composition and publishing history, and the influence of Warton's brother Thomas, who contributed in part to the publication, and his friend William Collins, who also wrote a collection of odes.]

An advertisement in the London Evening Post for Saturday, 29 November 1746 announced the imminent publication of Odes on Various Subjects by Joseph Warton, A.B. of Oriel College, Oxon. The publisher was Robert Dodsley, a man experienced in assessing the likely popularity of new poetry. His biographer, Ralph Straus, imputes to this business acumen Dodsley's decision to publish Warton's odes rather than those of William Collins whose Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects was published by Millar on 20 December.¹ The association between Collins and Warton was long-standing: they had written verse together as school-fellows at Winchester School; they had planned to publish their odes in collaboration when they met at Guildford races in May 1746;² and Collins remained on an intimate footing with both Joseph and his brother Thomas until he died. Straus appends a bibliography of Dodsley's publications in which the Odes appear against 4 December 1746. Advertisements announcing their publication appeared in the London General Advertiser and the Daily Advertiser on 5 December. Five weeks later Dodsley issued a second edition: the Daily Advertiser and The London Courant for Friday, 9 January 1747, announced its appearance.

Despite the considerable historical importance of the volume it has not been reprinted. This facsimile is of the first edition (British Museum shelf mark 11631 f. 36.). In the second edition Thomas Warton's “Ode to a Fountain” gives place to an “Ode on The Happy Life”; the only other change of significance is a 28-line extension to the first ode, “To Fancy”, beginning at verse 59:

Yet not these flowery fields of joy,
Can long my pensive mind employ,
Haste, fancy, from the scenes of folly
To meet the matron melancholy,
Goddess of the tearful eye.
That loves to fold her arms and sigh;
Let us with silent footsteps go
To charnels and the house of Woe,
To Gothic churches, vaults, and tombs,
Where each and night some virgin comes,
With throbbing breast and faded cheek,
Her promis'd bridegroom's urn to seek;
Or to some Abby's mould'ring tow'rs,
Where, to avoid cold wint'ry show'rs,
The naked beggar shivering lies,
While whistling tempests round her rise,
And trembles, lest the tottering wall
Should on her sleeping infants fall.
Now let us louder strike the lyre,
For my heart glows with material fire,
I feel, I feel, with sudden heat,
My big tumultuous bosom beat;
The trumpets dangers pierce my ear,
A thousand widows' shrieks I hear,
Give me another house, I cry,
Lo! the basic gallic squadrons fly;
Whence is this rage?—what spirit, say,
To battles hurries me away?
'Tis fancy in her fiery car …

In Notes and Queries, March 1970, (vol. ccxv, p. 93), James Powers argued an increased “romantic” content for the odes on the basis of this revision, to which Mary Stewart replied in June 1972 (vol. ccxvii, pp. 230-1) pointing out that the close proximity of the first to the second edition would rule out the possibility of significantly “romantic” developments in Warton's sensibility. Mary Stewart suggested that Dodsley made use of additional existing lines to bring out a second edition in reply to Collins's Odes. It seems far more likely, however, that during the Christmas vacation Joseph added the lines under the influence of his brother's “Pleasures of Melancholy” which Dodsley brought out on 8 April 1747: at the same time Thomas, whose “Ode to a Fountain” had first been included without his permission and was never acknowledged by him, probably withdrew it from the collection.³ It is also possible, though less likely, that Warton included the lines, whose subject as well as melancholy and pathos is war and its ravages, in emulation of Collins's “Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross in the Action of Fontenoy” (see Lonsdale, p. 455). In any event Collins's Odes did not sell and Mary Stewart's hypothesis seems to have no foundations in fact.

Warton's biographer, Wooll, prints a letter of 29 October 1746 from Joseph to his brother which suggests that Thomas's contribution to the volume was not confined to the “Ode to a Fountain”:

This moment I have received your Ode, for which I give you a thousand thanks; I am extremely pleas'd with it, and think it very poetical and correct, as far as I can judge by twice reading it: one or two little alterations to the epithets may be made such as ‘Ivy mantled’, because there is ivy darkened in the Ode to Despair; and fair is repeated several times, as also is polish'd: but these are trifles. You judge right in saying that I should like the fourth and sixth stanzas, they are as poetical as any thing I ever read: your transitions are very judicious, especially to your description of the ravages of the Goths: but of this more minutely hereafter.

(P. 214).

The observations seem to refer to Ode V, “To a Gentleman upon his Travels through Italy.’ (That this ode is in fact by Thomas Warton has been confirmed by David Fairer in an article “The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?”, Review of English Studies, August 1975, where he traces this ode to its source in the Trinity manuscript of the “Ode to Taste.”)

For Joseph Warton the publication of his Odes was a matter of more consequence than that of literary ambition. His father, to whom he had acted as curate at Basingstoke, had died in September 1745, and by February of the following year Joseph had moved to Chelsea. Here he cultivated the more eminent among his father's acquaintance. Thomas was still an undergraduate at Oxford, his sister Jane had to work as a governess, their mother was to be maintained, and he himself must frequently have had thoughts of marriage in his mind. He clearly considered the possibility of publishing by subscription, a method he used to bring out a collection of his father's poems in 1748. In a letter dated 18 March from Chelsea he tells Tom that Joseph Spence, his father's successor as Professor of Poetry, is

Pleas'd to be very fond of my “Ode to Solitude”, I shew'd all of them [the odes] to him, and he strongly advised me not to publish this Season. I gave him and Dr Young subscription papers. Dodsley has vex'd me extremely not to send the proposals to Fletcher as he was ordered a week ago … I am writing a new “Ode to Fancy”: in which I think I have succeeded: it will be very long.

(B.M. [Biographical Memoirs of the Rev. Dr Joseph Warton LL. D.] Add. MS 42560 f. 9.)

This presumably is the first version of the long ode with which the volume opens.

With Warton's earlier poem, The Enthusiast or Lover of Nature, 7 March 1744, this volume of odes ensured Warton's reputation as a rising poet. It also shows him leading a reaction against the poetry of Pope which led to the grouping together of a number of minor poets who soon became loosely designated as the “School of Warton.” For Warton prefaces his Odes with an Advertisement which is contentious and forthright: he attacks the fashion of moralizing in verse and declares the right channel of true poetry lies in the free use of invention and imagination. In an early prose satire Ranelagh House, 1744, Warton had already described Pope as a philosopher and not a poet: in 1756 he was to publish the first full-length critical assessment of any modern writer in his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope.

.....

The epigraph to Odes is taken from Euripides' Alcestis, ll. 582-7 (Collins had taken his epigraph from Pindar, whose odes are more nearly models for Collins's verses than they are for Warton's):

CHORUS:
… the witchery-winging
Notes brought dancing around thy shell,
Phoebus, the dappled fawn from the shadow
Of the tall-tressed pines tripping forth to the meadow.
Beating time to the chime of the rapture-ringing
Music, with light feet tranced by its spell.(4)

Alcestis ll. 582-7.

Warton invokes the spirit of true poetry as god-given and enthralling. Divine inspiration and the magic of song are best captured in the apparent spontaneity of the ode: its association of musicality with the figures of imagination is best displayed in the context of what is not only a classical but also a timeless pastoral setting. These elements in the eighteenth-century ode could easily be adapted to the treatment of a wide variety of material and to the shifting feelings of the versifier, as his imagination—like that of the poet in Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination—wandered alone, untrammelled by social obligation or satirical awareness, among conscious reflections and fancies awakened by the beauties of natural scenery, by sculpture, painting or poetry. Norman Maclean, dealing with the “treacherous history” of the ode in the eighteenth century (“From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century”), sees the imagination of the poet as the general conception to keep in mind when one looks at the new odes of the mid-century. And this might best be expressed in striking images. Of these none was more poetical than the metaphor. And of all metaphors, the use of the prosopopoeia or personification could provide the most striking evidence of the inventiveness of the imagination.⁵

Traditional access to the proliferation of fancy lay in the use of allegory and personification, as Collins acknowledged in his title—“Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects.” Furthermore, the potentialities of poetry might be regarded as co-extensive with those of painting and sculpture,⁶ as Spence's Oxford lectures on poetry, which Joseph Warton attended, had shown. For Dodsley the prosopopoeia, “animates all Nature, gratifies the Curiosity of Mankind with a constant Series and Succession of Wonders; raises and creates new Worlds and Ranks of notional Creatures, to be Monuments of the Poets' Wit, to espouse his Cause and speak his Passion” (The Preceptor, 1748, I, 358-9). Warton wrote in the 57th number of The Adventurer that the prosopopoeia showed “One of the greatest efforts of the creative power of a warm and glowing imagination.”

Earlier, in his Advertisement to these Odes, Warton is a highly conscious rebel against satire and didactic verse. He was, however, an acceptable rebel. The influence of Thomson, of Young and Akenside had already accustomed readers to blank verse reflections on natural scenery, and to the expression of poetic sensibility in an extension of personifications in pictorial as well as in reflective ways.

Warton's Odes are surprisingly varied. The pictorial treatment of personifications on which they are founded involve not merely the invention of physical and mental attributes for the abstraction, be it Fancy, Liberty, Health, Superstition, Despair, Evening or the Spring, but also the conception of the poem as a design—very different from the insistent couplet of contemporary satire—and a design in which the attributes and situation of the central figure(s) might receive visual presentation and fictional extension after the fashion of allegory. A letter from Thomas Warton to his brother perhaps implies some awareness of this in the poetry they were trying to write: the letter is a reply to one from Joseph which was written early in 1746: it is dated 19 April:

… I am glad you have laid aside the Temple of Pity, for that of writing an ode to it, in which you may not only mention her temple with all its attendants, but likewise bring in several of the unfortunate characters.

(B.M. Add MS 42560, f 5.)

.....

In his Specimens of the English Poets Thomas Campbell referred to the “graphic” style of the Wartons' poems. To whatever extent, then, the “Ode to Fancy” or “The Pleasures of Melancholy” seem at first mere echoes or amplifications of their Miltonic originals, “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” they are conscious attempts to direct poetry into a different and a more traditionally fruitful channel.

The best known contemporary comment on Warton's Odes is that of Gray. His letter of 27 December 1746, has often been quoted, but is still illuminating:

Have you seen the Works of two young Authors, a Mr Warton and a Mr Collins, both Writers of Odes? It is odd enough, but each is the half of a considerable Man, and one the Counter-Part of the other, the first has but little Invention, very poetical choice of Expression, and a good Ear, the second, a fine Fancy, model'd upon the Antique, a bad Ear, great Variety of Words, and Images with no Choice at all. They both deserve to last some years, but will not.

Perhaps Gray finds compensation for Warton's lack of inventiveness when compared with Collins in his control of pace and modulation of tone. Metrical units are matched, often sensitively, with syntax in a flexible use of different verse and stanza forms.

The Odes are more varied and skilled than has generally been recognized. They outline areas of feeling and experience which have to be restored to the provinces of poetry if it is to flourish, and occasionally they achieve in their own right a distinct note of victory.⁷

Most of the odes continued to be reprinted until the mid-nineteenth century: the most popular was the “Ode to Fancy” as it appeared in the second edition. Thomas Warton's “Ode to a Fountain” was reprinted in the major collections of the British Poets and ascribed to Joseph Warton. Selection of the odes for educationally improving anthologies was probably not unconnected with Joseph Warton's headship of Winchester school for over twenty years ….

Notes

1. Robert Dodsley, Poet, Publisher and Playwright (London, 1910), pp. 87, 153. Dodsley invited Mark Akenside (whose “Pleasures of Imagination” he had published in 1744) to edit the Museum (1746), a popular collection of poems by various hands including those of the Wartons, Collins, Whitehead, Garrick and Lord Harvey, among others. This was followed by his Collections of Poems, designed “to preserve to the public those poetical performances which seemed to merit a larger remembrance than would probably be secured to them by the manner in which they were originally published.” The first three volumes of the Collections were published in 1748, a fourth on 18 March 1755 and two final volumes in March 1758. See W. P. Courtney, Dodsley's Collection of Poetry, Contents and Contributors: A Chapter in the History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1910).

2. See Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (London, 1969), pp. 408-9.

3. “I returned from Milford last night, where I left Collins with my mother and sister, and he sets out today for London, I must now tell you that I have sent him imitation of Horace's Blandusian (sic) Fountain to be printed amongst ours, which you shall own or not as you think proper. I would not have done this without your concern, but because I think it very poetically and correctly done, and will get you honour.” J. Wooll, Memoirs of the Rev. Dr Joseph Warton LL.D. (London, 1806), p. 15.

4. Euripides, vol. IV. Translated by Arthur S. Way, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1912).

5. Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), p. 437.

6. See J. G. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago, 1958); L. Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970).

7. See Eric Partridge, The Three Wartons: A Choice of Their Verse (London, 1927). See also G. B. Schick, “Warton's conception of the true poet,” Boston University Studies in English 3 (1957); Julia Hysham, “Warton's reputation as a poet,” Studies in Romanticism 1 (1962); Joan Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton (London, 1973).