Campbell, Thomas

Educated at Glasgow University and influenced by Presbyterian and Scottish Enlightenment values, Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) burst onto the British literary scene at the age of 21, gaining sudden fame with the publication ofThe Pleasures of Hope(1799). Although writers like William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats were critical of Campbell's poetry, his contemporary admirers included the likes of Henry Mackenzie, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, the latter of whom preferred Campbell's formal classical style to that of the Lake Poets’ more experimental productions. And yet, while Campbell's literary neoclassicism reveals the influence of such eighteenth‐century poets as Pope, Goldsmith, Gray, and Thomson (Macaulay 1969), his liberal activism, love of nature, and sympathy for the lower classes demonstrate certain affinities with Romanticism (Miller 1978). Ultimately, Campbell was a transitional figure in British literary history; as William Hazlitt observed inThe Spirit of the Age, his best poetry engrafted ‘the wild and more expansive interest of the romantic school of poetry on classic elegance and precision’. According to Hazlitt,The Pleasures of Hope(1799) andGertrude of Wyoming(1809) are ‘two poems that have gone to the heart of a nation, and are gifts to the world’ (Hazlitt 1969).