Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. III. The Eighteenth Century: Addison to Blake

William Whitehead (1715–1785)

Critical Introduction by Thomas Humphry Ward

[Born at Cambridge in 1715; educated at Winchester and at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His poems were collected in 1754, and again in 1774. He became Poet Laureate in 1758, and died in 1785, in London.]

WILLIAM WHITEHEAD, who must not be confused with his clever and disreputable namesake, Paul Whitehead, the poet of the orgies of Medmenham, succeeded Cibber in the laureateship when Gray declined that doubtful honour. He was the perpetual butt of the satire of Churchill, who, as Campbell says, ‘completely killed his poetical character.’ Indeed his poetry is for the most part tame and conventional enough; yet here and there he emerges from the ruck of Georgian poetasters and becomes noticeable. Variety, a Tale for Married People, which is too long for quotation, is an excellent story in verse—with a moral, of course, as a conte should have—told in a light and flowing style not unworthy of Gay. The Enthusiast, an Ode, is here given, because of the admirable way in which it epitomises the debate—it is a perennial debate, but the eighteenth century took one side and we take the other—between Nature and Society.

—when the modern poet writes in this way, we note him as breaking the poetical concert of our age. But the doctrine is one which the poets of Pope’s century were for ever enforcing; even Cowper, antithesis to Pope as he was, enforced it; and this little ode of Whitehead’s is so happy a rendering of their argument that it is worthy of being rescued from the oblivion which has almost overwhelmed its author.