THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY POETA DE TRISTIBUS: OR, THE Poet's Complaint (1682) _Introduction and Notes by_ HAROLD LOVE PUBLICATION NUMBER 149 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 1971 GENERAL EDITORS William E. Conway, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ George Robert Guffey, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_ ASSOCIATE EDITOR David S. Rodes, _University of California, Los Angeles_ ADVISORY EDITORS Richard C. Boys, _University of Michigan_ James L. Clifford, _Columbia University_ Ralph Cohen, _University of Virginia_ Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Arthur Friedman, _University of Chicago_ Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_ Earl Miner, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_ Everett T. Moore, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Lawrence Clark Powell, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ James Sutherland, _University College, London_ H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_ Robert Vosper, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ Curt A. Zimansky, _State University of Iowa_ CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Lilly Kurahashi, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ INTRODUCTION _Poeta de Tristibus: or, the Poet's Complaint (PdT)_ was published by two newly established booksellers, Henry Faithorne and John Kersey, early in November 1681 (title-page dated 1682). The poem is only one of a large number of Restoration satires on writers as a group, its nearest neighbors in time being the pseudo-Rochester "A Session of the Poets," the anonymous "Advice to Apollo," Mulgrave's "An Essay upon Satyr," Otway's _The Poet's Complaint_, Robert Gould's "To Julian, Secretary to the Muses," the anonymous "Satire on the Poets," Shadwell's _The Tory Poets_, and Thomas Wood's _Juvenalis Redivivus_. It differs from these in its Hudibrastic meter, the richness of its biographical detail, and a relatively mild degree of animus against its victims, though there is quite a deal against poetry as art and trade.