Thomas Warwick

[4] Poems were also included in two miscellanies, the fashionable An Asylum for Fugitive Pieces, in Prose and Verse (1786)[5] and, in the following century, New Elegant Extracts: A Unique Selection from the Most Eminent British Poets (1823).

They are fiery: they are enthusiastic: they will remain, indeed, the too expressive types of a life irregular and eccentric, and of a death that put a sudden period to the career of his genius and his pleasures.

[7]In addition to The Rights of Sovereignty Asserted, with which he began his literary career, others in more regular style include the "Rhapsody written at Stratford upon Avon", the "Ode occasioned by the death of Prince Leopold", and the dramatic "Song of Blondel" intended for musical performance.

[12] In the preface to his own sonnets, Warwick defended the form, and particularly the example of John Milton, against Samuel Johnson's strictures, judging it "in extent of subject equally comprehensive with the Ode, and in its design more uniform and simple".

It deals with the Anglo-Saxon king Eadwig and was published anonymously in 1784, although its authorship seemed to be generally known and Warwick was so identified in the long discussion of the play in The English Review.

[18] A slightly earlier author who followed Milton's suggestion of subject was Thomas Sedgwick Whalley, whose poem Edwy and Edilda (Dodsley, 1779) was written in ballad metre.

[21] But since this version met with dismissive reviews, Warwick rewrote it considerably and published his new 1785 edition with a scholarly apparatus which fared a little better with critics.

[25] Titled Abelard to Eloisa : a poetic epistle newly attempted, this version was published anonymously a year before Warwick's poem and was dismissed by The Critical Review as "weak, nerveless and deprived of all power to please".