Sir Richard Blackmore, physician and man of letters, was a cultural event. His ambitious epic poetry provoked pamphlet wars and coffeehouse cabals; it earned artistic scorn and royal gratitude. Although Blackmore was called the "British Elijah" by Nahum Tate and the equal of Lucretius by John Dennis, he was ridiculed by Sir Samuel Garth as a maladroit cit, by John Dryden as a fool who wrote "Dead-born Doggerel," and by Alexander Pope as the father of the bathos, "indeed as the Homer of it." As Theophilus Cibber wrote in 1753, it was "as if to be at enmity with Blackmore had been hereditary to our greatest poets." The reasons for this enmity extend beyond Blackmore's artistic lapses, into the political and cultural tensions that shaped Enlightenment England; yet his name has become a synonym for literary duncedom when it has not been forgotten altogether.

A small revival of interest...