ENGLISH POETRY 1579-1830: SPENSER AND THE TRADITION

James Montgomery

(1771-1854)

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James Montgomery, the son of Moravian missionaries, was born in Ayrshire and educated at the Moravian school at Fulneck. In 1792 he was made clerk and bookkeeper at the Sheffield Register, which he later edited for three decades as the Sheffield Iris. Montgomery was imprisoned for libel in 1795 and 1796, occasioning his Prison Amusements (1797). His devotional poems gained an enormous following on both sides of the Atlantic, and his lectures on poetry delivered at the Royal Institute in 1830 and 1831 were also widely disseminated.


TEXT RECORDS:

1797The Pleasures of Imprisonment: an Epistle to a Friend.

PUBLICATIONS:

The history of a church and a warming pan. 1793.
The trial of James Montgomery for a libel on the war. 1795.
Prison amusements, and other trifles. 1797.
The whisperer; or, tales and speculations. 1798.
The wanderer of Switzerland, and other poems. 1806.
Poems on the abolition of the slave trade. 1809.
The West Indies and other poems. 1810.
The world before the flood: a poem, in ten cantos, with other occasional pieces. 1813.
Verses to the memory of Richard Reynolds. 1816.
Greenland, and other poems. 1819.
Abdallah and Labat. 1821.
Polyhymnia: or select airs of celebrated foreign composers, adapted to English words. 1822.
Songs of Zion: being imitations of psalms. 1822.
Prose, by a poet. 2 vols, 1824.
The Christian psalmist: or hymns selected and original. 1825.
The pelican island, and other poems. 1827.
Poetical works of Rogers, Campbell, James Montgomery, Lamb, and Kirke White. 1829.
Lectures on poetry and general literature. 1833.
Verses in commemoration of the Rev. James Hervey. 1833.
A poet's portfolio: or minor poems: in three books. 1835.
Lives of literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, etc. 3 vols, 1835-37.
Hymns for the opening of Christ Church, Newark on Trent. 1837.
Poetical works. 4 vols, 1841.
Poetical works, ed. Rufus Griswold. 2 vols, 1845.
Poetical works, ed. R. Carruthers. 5 vols, 1858.
Poems, selected by R. A. Willmott. 1860.
Poems. 1861.