Robert Potter (1721 – 9 August 1804) was an English clergyman of the Church of England and a translator, poet, critic and pamphleteer.
[3] Potter became curate of Reymerston and vicar of Melton Parva, but the combined emoluments of these were less than £50 a year.
He later became curate of Scarning, Norfolk,[4] as well as the master of the local Seckar's School from 1761 to 1789, but spent much of his time writing and translating.
For whatever reason, when Potter approached Thurlow to ask for a £10 subscription to his Sophocles translation, he received a valuable cathedral stall instead.
In June 1789 Lewis Bagot, Bishop of Norwich, presented Potter with the valuable vicarage of the combined parishes of Lowestoft and Kessingland, Suffolk, and in 1790 he moved again to Lowestoft, where died on 9 August 1804 and was buried in the parish churchyard.
[10] Potter is best remembered for his annotated English translations of Greek tragedies in blank verse.
[12] After completing his Euripides, Potter set about an essay on lyric poetry using some notes prepared for the translation of Pindar, but incorporating a defence of the work of Thomas Gray after recent criticisms of it by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets.
Elizabeth Montagu persuaded him to convert the project into An inquiry into some passages in Dr. Johnson's Lives of the poets: particularly his observations on lyric poetry, and the odes of Gray.
The antiquary Craven Ord found Potter "narrow in his circumstances with a disagreeable wife... rather an entertaining and well-behaved gentleman, with some singularities of thinking.