Thomas Warton

Thomas Warton (1728-1790), English literary historian, critic, and poet laureate. Warton was a member of an 18th-century family of English poets and critics that included his father Thomas Warton and his older brother Joseph, all forerunners of English romanticism. He was born in Basingstoke and educated at Oxford University, becoming professor of poetry there in 1757. Warton, in 1782, was one of the first to detect the Middle English poems of Thomas Chatterton as forgeries. In 1785 King George III appointed him poet laureate, a position he held until 1790.

The only collected edition of his poetry prepared during his lifetime was Poems (1777). Among his representative poems are “The Pleasures of Melancholy” (1747) and “The Grave of King Arthur” (1777). His greatest critical and scholarly works are Observations on the Faerie Queen of Spenser (1754), The History of English Poetry (1774-1781), and an edition of John Milton's poems, published in 1785. Because of his literary position, his interest in the works of Edmund Spenser and John Milton, and his knowledge of medieval life, Warton had a great influence on English poetry during the third quarter of the 18th century.