‘To Fame Unknown’: Familiar Verse Epistles of the Spring-Yelverton Coterie

Abstract

This article identifies Thomas Spring and Barry Yelverton as the authors of three previously unattributed poems written between 1758 and 1761, around the time these two were beginning their law studies at the Middle Temple in London. Based on internal evidence from the poems themselves and clues from Samuel Whyte’s 1772 anthology The Shamrock and other sources, I argue they should be viewed as products of a short-lived literary coterie. The article first examines the poems within their original manuscript context and how Spring and his friends explore the theme of choosing poetic anonymity as they contemplate embarking on careers in the law. Next, it examines the print history of these poems, which illustrates the conflicting motives of poets and anthologists who repackage manuscript poems in printed forms. Making these poems public in printed collections obscured the authors’ identities by obscuring the existence of the literary coterie to which they belonged. Bringing this coterie to light draws attention to the complex ways poetry functioned, in manuscript and in print, in eighteenth-century Ireland and invites further scholarly examination of these poems.