[Christopher ONeill]

Jayne:

Nahum Tate is one of my absolute favourites: I use his story in workshops all the time.

If you look closely at the history of Pope's Dunciad, Nahum Tate slowly becomes less prominent in the text as the poem is progressively revised. There are just a few hints in Pope's letters (nothing definite of course) that Pope may have realised that Tate was just a very awful poet, and might perhaps have decided to go easy on him.

Too bad to even be in the Dunciad? How sad must that make you feel?

And nearly everything Tate wrote was absolutely execrable (how else do you become a darling of the establishment?). Tate had sixty odd years to write poems which were even worse than Thomas Shadwell's.

Only, buried in among all the rest of Nahum Tate's dreck, you find As Pants the Hart, Silent Night, and the libretto of Dido and Aeneas.

Sixty years of being the worst poet in Europe, and the only consolation is writing the most beautiful Christmas Carol in English, and the first truly great English opera.

I'd settle for that.

I think most of us would.

......

(I also have a soft spot for Shadwell - though not as a poet).