Designs on Truth

Augustan mock-epic has long been read as clever satire in need of excuse, judged against Matthew Arnold and the Romantic idea of what poetry ought to be. Gregory Colomb sets that tribunal aside and argues that the form had settled expectations of its own, a poetics that separates these poems from the Horatian epistles they are so often grouped with. His central question is how historical particulars, the real people, classes and kinds the poets mocked, are made poetic. He traces this through narrative fable and character portrait.

Along the way he offers new readings, including the first comprehensive account of Samuel Garth's The Dispensary since the eighteenth century. This is a rigorous study for scholars and serious students of eighteenth-century verse, and it rethinks how fact and judgment work together in poetry.