Thomas Warton (1728-90)

Abstract Thomas Warton followed in the footsteps of his father, Thomas Warton the elder (c. 1688-1745), not only as a poet but also as a professor of poetry at Oxford University. Warton established a model for eighteenth-century sonnet writing that would influence Charlotte Smith, William Lisle Bowles, and William Wordsworth. He wrote the first substantial literary history, The History of English Poetry (1774-81), and became poet laureate in 1785, the year in which he also produced an edition of Milton’s poetry.