Jonathan Kramnick argues that the eighteenth century was, via Spenser, able to mentally transform feudal social structures into systems of literary valuation, thereby creating an aristocracy of culture. But holiness, the auratic, is not enough to inaugurate the thoroughly institutional process of canonization. Joseph Warton’s list (Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser) makes a holy trinity, not a canon. A “canon” is a list of texts that has been ratified by the clergy as springing from divine inspiration, and the discipline of English literature – insofar as it takes up many religious tasks for a secular world – needed its gods, its holy trinity, before the texts that they inspired could be determined and heretics excluded.

    Additionally, there is no possible way to construe as “the canon” the complete list of authors about whom Samuel Johnson wrote his famous prefaces: some of our canonicals are among them, but many are now forgotten.@The Works of the English Poets, with Prefaces Biographical and Critical (1779). As Boswell put it, Johnson wrote prefaces “to any dunce’s works.”@Boswell 3.137, qtd. in Bonnell 128 n. 2. Thomas Bonnell calls John Bell’s 109-volume The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (1776-1782) “a comprehensive English literary canon,” but notices immediately that “the edition was lopsided: forty-seven of the poets had written within the 140-year span from [Milton to Gray], and only three poets within the preceding 250 years (Chaucer, Spenser, and Donne)” (130). Moreover, many of the eighteenth-century poets whose entire poetical works are included in Bell are not at all what we would consider canonical: Savage, Tickell, Lyttelton, Watts, Pitt, to name just a few. These “vast” eighteenth century lists forged by Johnson’s Works and Bell’s Poets are too large and unwieldy to qualify as “the canon.” Alok Yadav’s Before the Empire of English dates the canon’s emergence later, sometime between 1810 and 1860. “By 1810, George Crabbe could refer to ‘the vast collection of English poetry,’” Yadav says. He continues: “in 1857, [Trollope] refers to ‘the imperishable list of English poets’” (27). As I will show in what follows, a “vast” list becomes a canon, an imperishable short-list, during that 50-year span. Authors and works can more easily be considered “imperishable” if not too numerous to be remembered by future generations.

Though it does not give us a canon, Bell’s The Poets of Great Britain does something to transform the vast list of English authors into a canon,@Bell’s list is much closer to the canon than Johnson’s. albeit not quite enough. Bell’s plan included the intent to “print entire, without abstraction or mutilation of poems, or parts of poems, the whole original pieces in English.”@Bell, Cowley 1:[lviii], qtd. in Bonnell 133. This body metaphor is pervasive in the advertisements, prefaces, and titles of miscellaneous poetry collections produced throughout the eighteenth century.