Thomas Warton the Younger

Thomas Warton (1728–1790) was an English poet, critic and literary historian, born at Basingstoke, the younger son of Thomas Warton the Elder and the brother of Joseph Warton. A Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1757 to 1767, Camden Professor of Ancient History from 1785, and Poet Laureate from 1785 until his death.

His History of English Poetry (1774–81) and Observations on the Faerie Queene (1754) did much to revive interest in medieval and Spenserian verse. His own poems, among them The Pleasures of Melancholy (1747), The Triumph of Isis (1749) and a group of antiquarian sonnets, anticipate the Romantic taste for ruins and the Middle Ages.