The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696–1743)

John, Lord Hervey (1696–1743), the confidant of Queen Caroline and antagonist of Alexander Pope, was a government minister, a political pamphleteer and a poet. In his verse writings, collected together for the first time in this edition, he savagely attacks his opponents, including the King and his ministers, as well as Pope, but he also expresses his deepest personal feelings. Hervey was married, with eight children, and his verse conveys his affection for his wife and family members, but his strongest commitment was to his lover, Stephen Fox. Some of his verse is written directly to Fox, but he also explores intense emotional conflicts in Ovidian epistles (which include 'lesbian' poems), in a verse tragedy Agrippina and through his collaborative poetic relationship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Although his verse was sometimes mocked by contemporaries, he was a fluent and flexible versifier and a master of poetic argument.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Abbreviations; Introduction; Epistles; Satires; Elegies, epitaphs and an epilogue; Epigrams and a riddle; Occasional verse - social, humorous and complimentary; Shorter translations, paraphrases and imitations; Telemachus and Agrippina; Embedded original verse; Verse in Latin and in French; Descriptions of manuscript sources; List of print sources; Textual introduction; Lists of emendations and historical collations; Appendices; Index of titles; Index of first lines; Index (names, places and historical events).

About the Author :
Bill Overton (1946–2012) was Professor of Literature at Loughborough University. Publicly defining himself as a 'generalist', he published on nineteenth-century European novels, on Shakespeare and (increasingly after 1995) on eighteenth-century poetry. This edition of John, Lord Hervey's verse was his final work. Elaine Hobby is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Studies at Loughborough University. She has edited midwifery manuals, life-writings and religio-political pamphlets, and is currently working on an edition of the writings of Aphra Behn for Cambridge University Press. James McLaverty is Emeritus Professor of Textual Criticism at Keele University. Much of his work has focused on Hervey's great antagonist, Alexander Pope, and he is the co-editor, with Paddy Bullard, of Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge, 2013). He currently serves as one of the General Editors of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift.

Review :
'This substantial and handsomely produced volume both makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of eighteenth-century English poetry and offers a touching tribute to a distinguished scholar in that field. Bill Overton was Professor of Literary Studies at Loughborough University until his untimely death in 2012.' David Hopkins, The Review of English Studies