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Joseph Warton |
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It is common for the brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton to be regarded as a single phenomenon, and to speak of "the Wartons" has a certain justice. They sustained an affectionately close relationship throughout their lives, shared many of the same friends, and helped each other in a variety of critical and poetic projects. It is also convenient for literary history to place them together as "pioneers of Romanticism," primitivists and Gothic enthusiasts who broke away from the "School of [Alexander] Pope" and helped through their critical and poetic writings to reestablish the "native" tradition of Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Joseph and Thomas Warton thought of themselves as pioneers; they attempted consciously to change the taste of the public, and Joseph's An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), with its demotion of Pope to the second rank of poets, was in effect complemented by Thomas's Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser (1754), his recovery in The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1774-1781) of much older literature, and his edition of the early poems of Milton (1785).
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