Although celebrated as "the learned, pious and incomparable Dr. Young" (as reported by biographer Harold Forster) by generations of British, Continental, and American readers of his Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts (1742-1746), Edward Young has been little enough regarded by scholars and general readers of the last 130 years that Robert Birley could enshrine him among other neglected worthies in the 1962 volume Sunk without Trace. Few even of his late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century admirers were aware of the extraordinary range of Young's achievement in a literary career that spanned half a century. His work in occasional verse, tragedy, verse satire, the lyric ode, meditative blank verse, and the prose essay at times reflected, but more often anticipated, his century's much-noted shifts in literary taste.

Young was baptized on 3 July 1683 at Upham near Winchester, the son of Edward and Judith Young. At that time rector of the parish, his father would in later...