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.

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).

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.