Throughout her life Lady Mary liked to refer to herself as a poet, often with a touch of irony or self-deprecation. At fifteen or so she confessed to the folly of having 'trespass'd wickedly in Rhime', her confession taking the form of an eight-line poem. At sixty-nine she described herself as 'haunted … by the Dæmon of Poesie'.

Her contemporaries took her verse seriously. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, referred to her fame in a 'sessions of the poets' piece. Many of the voices raised to honour her are suspect—seekers for her patronage or protesters against Pope's satire. Admirers who carry more weight included the young Pope himself, who longed to read her 'Sonnets'; Lord Hervey, who got her verses by heart; Horace Walpole, who found them as first 'too womanish' but later 'excessively good'; the distinguished foreigners Antonio Conti, who translated them into Italian, and Voltaire and Algarotti, who quoted them; and perhaps most surprising of all, Lord Auchinleck, father of James Boswell. Late in this chorus of praise, resisting the new definitions of poetry to which he had himself contributed, came Byron, demanding of the fourth stanza of 'The Lover', 'Is not her "Champaigne and Chicken" worth a forest or two? Is it not poetry?' [Letters and Journals, 1898-1901]. The nineteenth century in general (Words-worth, Leigh Hunt, Walter Bagehot) thought it was not. George Saintsbury ruled out poetry, the true diamond, when he wrote that her 'verse flashes with the very best paste in Dodsley' [The Peace of the Augustans, 1916].

Yet today Lady Mary's poems need no apology. She herself would not have claimed diamond quality for them, though she did claim to have inscribed eleven lines on a window pane with a diamond. This rather unlikely verve and facility, this small scale, was what she aimed at in poetry. She had the habit of dashing off verse extempore. Her poems demonstrate the continuing vitality of the Augustan tradition within which she wrote, its power to shape the voice and even the thinking of a minor talent. The tradition supplied her not only with forms but with satirical or moral stances based on inheritance from or reaction against the past. She had the gift of successfully embodying her idiosyncratic opinions and attitudes in a verse style heavily influenced by her contemporaries and immediate predecessors, especially Dryden and the Pope of the 1717 Works.

Packed with allusion, echoes, parody, her verse is none the less distinctively her own. Its range is remarkable: Ovidian and Horatian epistles, mock-eclogue, mock-epic, songs and ballads, description, meditation, and translation. Despite her reference to the daemon of poesie, most of her poems owe their existence to the provocation of some outside stimulus, some love-affair, political issue, or debating point to be made.

As a woman and an aristocrat, Lady Mary frequently expressed horror at the idea of writing for print. Yet she may well have connived at or even arranged for the publication of her verse attacks on Pope and Swift. Perhaps for reasons of prudence, she copied neither of these printed poems into the album, now Harrowby MS. 256, which bore her claim, 'all the verses and Prose in this Book were wrote by me, without the assistance of one Line from any other. Mary Wortley Montagu.' This volume contains most of her more successful poems, but with some notable omissions. Others she kept in rough draft, in separate copies, or not at all. Individual poems strayed into print in her lifetime, beginning with the three eclogues stolen and printed anonymously by Curll in 1716 [the critic identifies these in a footnote: "Court Poems: 'Monday', 'Thursday', and 'Friday']. The first collection was published by Horace Walpole in 1747, with her initials on the title-page. He and Joseph Spence had both read her poems, probably in what is now H MS. 256, in Italy; Spence had many of them copied into a volume which he corrected himself. The number of pieces in print as hers was enlarged by the London Magazine and by Dodsley's Collection, 1748. Dodsley's second edition, published later that year, transferred Lady Mary's poems from volume three to volume one; later editions added a few more poems. Issac Reed gathered most of what was available from these sources in a volume of Poetical Works, 1768; James Dallaway enlarged the canon in the last volume of his edition of Lady Mary's Works, 1803. Despite her family's permission to use her papers he reproduced existing inaccurate printed texts, and when printing from MS. adapted freely. Later editors of her works added only a few poems and corrected none. Nor did they explain the grounds on which they accepted or rejected attributions to her.

[Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy] is as far as possible and within certain definable limits complete. She wrote other poems of which no copies survive, as comments by her contemporaries indicate. She also adapted other people's work. [This collection includes] such poems as 'Satyr', modelled on Boileau but substantially an original piece, while omitting some in which Lady Mary made only the most minimal alterations to her source. These include poems previously printed among her works, like 'The Bride in the Country' (which she adapted from another satirical ballad to apply to the marriage of her niece), 'Character' (adapted from verse by Robert Wolseley and William Wharton), and 'To the Same' ('Thôold in ill, the Traitor sure shall find', which she condensed from Creech's translation of Juvenal). An imitation of Dorset's famous ballad, beginning 'To all you ladies now at Bath' and entitled 'Farewell to Bath', appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1731 as by 'Lady M. Montagu', and has been anthologized as Lady Mary's. I have omitted it since even if the ascription is accurate, Lady Mary's name was extremely unlikely to be formulated this way except on the Continent. The designation fits at least two other ladies, daughters of Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, and the 2nd Duke of Montagu.

I have omitted the poems from Lady Mary's two juvenile albums, composed at the age of fourteen or a little older. These are interesting as late re-workings of various seventeenth-century conventions, but have too little intrinsic merit and too great length to justify inclusion. I have omitted fragments and insignificant separate couplets, except those already printed. Passages of verse available among her Complete Letters (mainly epistles to Hervey and fragments to Algarotti) are likewise not included here. I have, however, reprinted her poetic rendering 'Turkish Verses', and her epitaph on the lovers struck by lightning, which readers may expect to find among her poems.

The problem of attribution is a tricky one. I have printed, with brief comment, poems in which other writers besides Lady Mary shared, like the 'Friday' eclogue, Dunciad imitations, and the Verses to the Imitator of Horace. There can be little doubt about the poems from H MS. 256, and these are all included here. A few poems in another album (H MS. 255) are marked with her monogram MWM; yet two of these come under the category of adaptations made by the substitution of only a word here and there. Of these one seemed worth inclusion, the other not. The same volume yields a few unmarked poems which seem to be by Lady Mary.

She transcribed many poems without giving any author's name, and she also saved copies made by other people. Some of these poems may be by her, but without further evidence I have supposed that they are not. Sometimes heavy correction in her hand supplies evidence of authorship. I have accepted some but not all of the attributions of those with fairly close knowledge of her: Horace Walpole, Sir James Caldwell, and Lady Oxford and her daughter the Duchess of Portland. This volume therefore contains only poems which are almost certainly by Lady Mary, without the many which may be by her, or which have been wrongly attributed to her.