Poetry and possibility Book

Dolan traces English poetry from Milton's time, when readers and critics insisted poetry be grounded in real events -- specifically royal occasions, military conquests, and death. Poets were scrapping for whatever recognition they could get, and fighting over memorializations of minor dignitaries they hardly knew.

Poets looking for recognition (and this is a major point in Dolan's work: the idea that poetry was a career and that poets are ambitious but generally had to avoid admitting it) had to expand the criteria for an occasion: an answer to a previously published poem, the death of nameless peasants, or of a beloved pet, and purely 'mental events' occurring only in the poet's mind were all strategies used to expand the occasional poem's boundaries. Guys like Cowper and Gray were the real innovators, but they had to apologize or sneak it into their works. Wordsworth's big innovation was that he unapologetically used these new techniques, to the point where seemingly every English poem starts with a solitary figure walking through a landscape feeling emotions.

The book isn't as great as Dolan's other work, but that's because this is an academic work, and by academic standards it's quite enjoyable.

The book ends with an appendix of Johnson's account of Dryden's funeral, where the poet went - in Dolan's words - from 'occasional poet to poetic occasion'.