Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

Johnson began writing individual biographical pieces in 1740, the first being devoted to Jean-Philippe Baratier, Robert Blake, and Francis Drake.

Then in 1777 the publisher John Bell proposed to bring out a 109-volume set of The Poets of Great Britain complete from Chaucer to Churchill, printed in Edinburgh at the rate of a volume a week.

Soon afterwards, advertisements began to appear announcing “The English Poets, with a preface biographical and critical, to each author…elegantly printed in small pocket volumes, on a fine writing paper, ornamented with the heads of the respective authors, engraved by the most eminent artists”.

[3] Johnson was slow to put pen to paper, although on 3 May 1777 he wrote to Boswell that he was busy preparing "little Lives and little Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets".

"[5] However, while so engaged, he made a few suggestions of his own for inclusion, including the poems of John Pomfret, Thomas Yalden, Isaac Watts, Richard Blackmore’s The Creation and James Thomson’s The Seasons.

The extended Life of Richard Savage of 1744 was incorporated with very few changes; an article on the Earl of Roscommon, previously published in The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1748, was worked over to conform to Johnson’s overall plan.

Even though the choice of authors was limited to those who were dead, some among the most recently deceased were not included, notably Charles Churchill (of whom Johnson disapproved) and Oliver Goldsmith, but this may have been due to copyright issues in both cases.

[9] Indeed, it has been conjectured that the 1785 new edition of George Colman and Bonnell Thornton’s 2-volume Poems by Eminent Ladies (originally published in 1755) may have been meant as a conscious supplement to the all-male series.

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature instances as examples "its strictures on Milton's Lycidas, Gray's Odes, and its evident prejudice against Swift", as well as the hostile characterisation of the Metaphysical style in the life of Abraham Cowley.

Oliver Goldsmith appears midway through the book and is given only twenty-four pages, less than those awarded William Mason and Erasmus Darwin, who precede and follow him.

From the point of view of comprehensive coverage, Alexander Chalmers advanced little beyond his predecessor in his The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (1810).

[20] But Philip Smallwood, commenting on the Lives in The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800, nuances this by pointing out that Johnson did not set out to produce a literary history.