‘Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790’ explores the role of poetry in eighteenth-century thinking on human progress. Its central contention is that the textural, verbal characteristics of poetry were a crucial form of response to ideas of human development. That is, the aesthetics of verse – how poetry appeals to the senses as well as to the intellect – constitute inadequately appreciated forms of response to the ideas of progress which were developing and gaining popular traction in Britain in the period 1760–1790.