Lives of the Poets is a biographical works of popular poets like Cowley, Denham, Milton, Butler, Rochester, Roscommon, Otway. Written by Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer.

Such was the simple and unpretending advertisement that announced the Lives of the English Poets; a work that gave to the British nation a new style of biography. Johnson's decided taste for this species of writing, and his familiarity with the works of those whose lives he has recorded, peculiarly fitted him for the task; but it has been denounced by some as dogmatical, and even morose; minute critics have detected inaccuracies; the admirers of particular authors have complained of an insufficiency of praise to the objects of their fond and exclusive regard; and the political zealot has affected to decry the staunch and unbending champion of regal and ecclesiastical rights. Those, again, of high and imaginative minds, who "lift themselves up to look to the sky of poetry, and far removed from the dull-making cataract of Nilus, listen to the planet-like music of poetry;" these accuse Johnson of a heavy and insensible soul, because he avowed that nature's "world was brazen, and that the poets only delivered a golden."

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More Books by Samuel Johnson

A Grammar of the English Tongue

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

Preface to Shakespeare

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland