1726 in poetry
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Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
Henry Carey's poem, Namby Pamby: or, a panegyrick on the new versification address'd to A----- P----, published this year (some sources give the publication year as 1725), satirizes the poetry of Ambrose Philips, with the name a play on the first three letters of "Ambrose". Carey and others, including John Gay, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, used the term as a disparaging nickname for Philips, but this year Carey was the first to put it into print. Carey's poem, a reaction against the style of Philips' To the Honourable Miss Carteret of 1725, mimicked the cloying, overly sentimental reduplication in some verse Phillips had written for children or as elegies of dead children, such as these opening lines from Miss Charlotte Pulteney, in Her Mother’s Arms:
Compare with Carey's lampoon of this year:
In The Dunciad (1733), Pope would also make fun of Philips: "Beneath his reign, shall [...] Namby Pamby be prefer'd for Wit!" Pope despised Philips for both political and professional reasons, in part because Whig critics such as Joseph Addison had compared Philips' rustic verse favorably to that of Pope, a Tory. Within a generation, "Namby Pamby" began to broaden its meaning, so that in William Ayres' Memoirs of the life and writings of Alexander Pope of 1745, Jonathan Swift was said to be referring to the "Namby Pamby Stile" of writing. By 1774, the meaning had broadened further, covering anything ineffectual or weak, so that The Westmoreland Magazine could refer to "A namby-pamby Duke". The hyphenated phrase now covers anything ineffectual or affectedly sentimental.
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
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