The living pantheon of poets in 1820 Gill sees this work as marking an end to one phase in Wordsworth’s life as a poet, with the Ecclesiastical Sketches begun shortly thereafter marking a new beginning;14 in any event, it was a new opportunity for Wordsworth to construct himself as a poet, and, since there was a thirteen-year silence after 1822, this burst of activity in essence defined Wordsworth as he came to be widely recognized as the future Poet Laureate.15 While other poets may not have had the year Wordsworth did (though Crabbe, whose most popular volume, Tales of the Hall, was printed in 1819, saw new editions of The Borough [1810] and Poems, as well as a sevenvolume edition of his poetical works), 1820 did see significant activity by writers who remain familiar The year that saw Keats’s last volume saw John Clare’s first, as he issued Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery Shelley produced three volumes, all reflecting his varied engagement with the drama Hunt’s translation of Tasso’s Amyntas was one of several works sent forth by the Cockney School, with “Barry Cornwall” publishing two volumes, Marcian Colonna and A Sicilian Story, with Diego de Montilla, and Other Poems, John Hamilton Reynolds following up the success of his parody of Peter Bell with The Fancy: A Selection of the Poetical Remains of the Late Peter Corcoran, Of Grey’s Inn, Student At Law With a Brief Memoir of His Life, and Cornelius Webb, a minor but infamous member of the circle cited in Blackwood’s attacks upon the group, issuing Sonnets, Amatory, Incidental, & Descriptive; with Other Poems More established poets were well represented: there were three editions of the opening cantos of Byron’s Don Juan, a twelve-volume edition of Sir Walter Scott’s poetical works, an edition of the works of Burns along with new editions of four other pieces, and two pirated editions of Southey’s Wat Tyler Hemans’s Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King was one example of elegiac pieces on the death of George III that would lead to Southey’s adulatory Vision of Judgment the next year, and to Byron’s riposte, which would satirize both the dead king and his Poet Laureate Different views were also on offer The “Quaker poet,” Bernard Barton, issued Poems with lines critical of Shelley, and Walter Savage Landor produced a volume of Latin verse, Idyllia Heroica Decem, to which he attached an essay, “De cultu atque usu Latini sermonis,” which took up modern poetry and contained criticisms of Byron We can also see the arrival of writers who would help define future literary developments, with 1820 seeing the first volumes of poetry by Bulwer Lytton (Ismael; An Oriental Tale With Other Poems) and Elizabeth Barrett (The Battle of Marathon A Poem, with an epigraph from Byron) and with Laetitia Landon first achieving fame with the publication of her poem “Rome” in William Jerdan’s The Literary Gazette of March 11, 1820 It was then a good year for experimental verse, though, of course, at the time, no one 19 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008