Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, March 10th, 2025.

And this week on The Daily Poem, we are going to camp out in the lively and tumultuous

18th century for a few days and spent time in particular with a group known as

the Scriblerus Club. This was a group of men of letters, notably satirists. Many of them were

also poets, however. They included Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, whose names still loom large in the world of English letters,

as well as John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbethnot.

And these men were coming together in an interesting time.

That word means almost nothing today because of the various ways we use it, but in this

case, I mean it more like that ancient Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times.

The times were interesting in the 18th century because this is a period when increasingly reliable means of travel,

development of printing technologies,

and the immortal giddiness and pettiness of the human mind

were all coming together in a new and unprecedented way to create the first age of social media.

This was a time when newspapers were exploding in popularity and in subscribership, and as a result,

there was this new medium for writing and talking about anything and anyone.

And so people who published found themselves all of a sudden subject to the opinion and comment of anyone.

And if you have spent even five minutes on Facebook, you know that human decency doesn't last long in this kind of arena. And notions of decorum are about

as resilient as a ball of cotton candy in a swimming pool. As a result, you had men like the

scribblarians who were increasingly bold in their satire and even in their more unguarded

or more explicit criticism of the follies they perceived in their own day and in their own

countrymen.

...