Joseph Warton Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Trevor Ross

Critical Essay by Trevor Ross

SOURCE: Ross, Trevor. “‘Pure Poetry’: Cultural Capital and the Rejection of Classicism.” Modern Language Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 1997): 437-57.

In the following essay, Ross employs Pierre Bourdieu's economic theories to argue that the anti-classicist revolution set in motion by Joseph Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope is an attempt to define the function of culture, or the cultural field, whose autonomy had been increasingly driven by politics and economic exchange at the expense of poetics and art.

Less than a decade after his death, Alexander Pope's preeminence in the English canon began to be challenged by polemicists hoping to rid English poetry of its neoclassical values and to promote a new ideal of what Joseph Warton and others called a “pure poetry” of feeling, as epitomized by Shakespeare's artless tragedies, Spenser's Gothic enchantments, and Milton's boundless sublimities. In a notorious passage from the dedication to...
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