SOURCE: Reid, Hugh. “The Printing of Joseph Warton's Odes.” Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 84, no. 2 (June 1990): 151-56.

In the following excerpt, Reid looks at Joseph Warton's Odes and argues that while some considered that the volume went into a second edition a sign of its poetic merit, there were other factors motivating the second edition.

In literary history Joseph Warton is chiefly remembered for his Essay on Pope, the first volume of which was published only twelve years after the poet's death and which began a reexamination and reevaluation of Pope's works. Its publication marks a convenient place from which to view Pope criticism and, indeed, mid-eighteenth-century criticism. The two editions of Warton's Odes have also been regarded as significant in understanding the changes in poetic vogue in the mid-1740s—the time immediately following Pope's death (1744). That Warton's Odes went into a second edition is...