John Wolcot (Peter Pindar)

John Wolcot (1738–1819), who wrote as 'Peter Pindar', was born in Devon and trained as a physician before turning to satire. His Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians (1782) and the long run of comic verse that followed, much of it aimed at George III, his court and the painters of the Royal Academy, made him one of the most widely read humorous poets of the 1780s and 1790s.

'Peter Pindar' is only a pen-name: he is not the Greek lyric poet Pindar, who has a page of his own in the archive. The poems here are those that James Parton printed under the name in his anthology The Humorous Poetry of the English Language.