SOURCE: Suarez, Michael F. “Trafficking in the Muse: Dodsley's Collection of Poems and the Question of Canon.” In Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker, pp. 297-313. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Suarez discusses how Dodsley's Collection of Poems was edited, marketed to a specialized readership, and came to be thought of as representative of mid-eighteenth-century English poetics.

I

In his ‘Introduction’ to The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984), Roger Lonsdale presents a conventional map of eighteenth-century poetry as a well-charted and comfortably domesticated landscape, only to suggest that beyond the well-worn track of our customary excursions there lies a vast and unexplored terra incognita. ‘Since the landscape of eighteenth-century poetry is now apparently so well mapped and likely to afford so few unexpected perspectives …’, he writes, ‘it will seem outrageous to suggest...