POETRY, POLITICS, FRIENDSHIP,AND THE NEOCLASSICAL IDEAL
Although the Spectator overshadows his other writing, in the eighteenth century Addison had a significant role as a literary critic who focused contemporary attention on the importance of style. In his time he was considered an influential, if minor, poet and an impressive classical scholar. These talents, in combination with his literary posture of objective perspective and balanced judgment, manifested in learning lightly worn, helped to define the social and literary ideal of neoclassicism. Early in his life he was renowned for his Latin verses, which won him the attention of Dr. William Lancaster, a fellow （and soon to be provost） of his Oxford College, Queens. He rapidly obtained a demyship （scholarship） at Magdalen College, which led to a fellowship that he held from 1698 until 1711. These, and his continual Latin compositions, stamped him as a literary professional, but his social skills also deeply shaped his success.
He first won public attention with his poem "To Mr. Dryden" （1693）, a panegyric on the poets classical translations that appeared in the important Examen Poeticum, which was itself edited by the sometime poet laureate, John Dryden. The third of a multivolume series of poetical miscellanies, this collection established the taste for heterogeneous, light verse that shaped taste for the next half century. It was a coup for Addison to publish in such a collection, but the conglomeration of ballads, prologues, satire, translations, and light verse in these volumes also made them an apt venue for Addisons poetry. His poems characteristically elide genres, merging panegyric with description, and wit with reverence while addressing a diverse range of subjects. He wrote not only on politics and divinity, but also penned verses on a barometer, a puppet-show, and a mock-heroic battle between pygmies and cranes. Four more of his poems, all infusing classical forms with conversational lightness, appeared in subsequent volumes of Tonsons Miscellany Poems, including "An Account of the Greatest English Poets" and "Poem to His Majesty." This blend of tact, politics, and classical learning characterized the literary man of the time, but Addisons contribution was greater. His concern for stylistic questions, manifested in his translations as well as his essays, helped to make aesthetic technique a central criterion for literary evaluation.
In his prose works, too, Addison had an important talent for showing how immersion in classical culture could enrich the perception of contemporary life, even as he also saw all culture and history in a political light. While traveling on the Continent from 1699 to 1703 with the aid of a government grant, he published the verse Letter from Italy, and probably composed Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Metals, published posthumously. Fusing history, politics, and social observation, Addisons popular travelogue exemplified intellectual reflection and an enthusiastic sense of the power of learning to elucidate experience, features that also appear in his discussion of medals as illustrated by Latin verse. His comments on Italy, nonetheless, are saturated with his advocacy of progress, republicanism, and trade. This ability to infuse political perception into entertaining literary fare was pre- cious in the early eighteenth century. Upon his return in 1703, Addisons political cronies urged him to compose a celebration of Marlboroughs victory at Blenheim. The resuit, The Campaign, written in heroic couplets, and published in December 1704, was so successful that Tonson immediately published Addisons Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, which itself quadrupled in price before the second edition of 1718. In The Campaign, Addison heroicizes Marlborough while retaining a good portrait of his real character. The poem is also an accurate narrative of the battle. Like the Spectator, this blend of fact and fiction demonstrated the emerging technique of literary realism.
