SOURCE: Tracy, Clarence. Introduction to The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, edited by Clarence Tracy, pp. 1-11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

In the following essay, Tracy reviews some of Savage's most important works, discusses the critical attention they received from his contemporaries, and offers a short bibliography of editions of the poet's works that appeared after his death in 1743.

Eighteenth-century readers thought highly of Savage as a writer, laying his shortcomings to the charge of his upbringing, his education, and his misfortunes. As a mere boy, known only as the author of some ‘treasonable and seditious pamphlets’, he was already recognized in Grub Street and employed in correcting the work of a less talented writer of Jacobite propaganda. A few years later, when he had emerged from the underworld, Aaron Hill spoke of his ‘genius’, painstakingly criticized his work, and helped him get it into print. Pope read...