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.