SOURCE: Gosse, Edmund. “Two Pioneers of Romanticism: Joseph and Thomas Warton.” In Proceedings of the British Academy: 1915-1916, pp. 145-63. Nendeln/Liechtenstein, Germany: Kraus Reprint, 1976.

In the following lecture, originally presented in 1915, Gosse examines what Thomas and Joseph Warton found stimulating in poetry available during their childhood and what they disapproved of in the popular contemporary verse of their adulthoods. The critic offers close readings of several of their works, including Joseph Warton's The Enthusiast and his Essay on Pope.

The origins of the Romantic Movement in literature have been examined so closely and so often that it might be supposed that the subject must be by this time exhausted. But no subject of any importance in literature is ever exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay, burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their ever-varying organs of perception to them. I intend, with...