Its first publication was Namby Pamby: or, a panegyrick on the new versification address'd to A----- P----, where the A-- P-- implicated Ambrose Philips.
Philips had written a series of odes in a new prosody of seven-syllable catalectic trochaic tetrameter and dedicated it to "all ages and characters, from Walpole steerer of the realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery."
Carey adopts Philips's choppy line-form for his parody and latches onto the dedication to nurseries to create an apparent nursery rhyme that is, in fact, a grand bit of nonsense and satire mixed.
Alexander Pope had criticized Philips repeatedly (in The Guardian and in his Peri Bathos, among other places), and praising or condemning Philips was a political as much as poetic matter in the 1720s, with the nickname also employed by John Gay and Jonathan Swift.
The poem begins with a mock-epic opening (as had Pope's Rape of the Lock and as had Dryden's MacFlecknoe), calling all the muses to witness the glory of Philips's prosodic reform: Carey's Namby Pamby had enormous success.