In this class, we'll probe an 18th-century cultural event that still reverberates, loudly, in the study of literature today: the establishment of a privileged group of poets as a British national literary canon. Why poets--that is, why writers of poetry--and why poets, as individuals firmly rooted in historical biographies and careers? Our major reading, Boswell's rich and monumental 'Life of Johnson' (1791), serves as both a narrative and a case study of the work of canonization: we'll investigate Johnson's own active contributions to the nascent historiography of English literature, through his 'Lives of the Poets', his dictionary of English, and his edition of Shakespeare, while we also study the ways in which Boswell's biography worked to establish Johnson in the same national pantheon. In addition to Boswell and Johnson, we'll become familiar with a few of the eighteenth-century writers Johnson admired, knew, and promoted, including Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomas Gray, and Frances Burney. And we'll consider recent scholarly writing on the eighteenth century's anxious sense of its own place in history, including essays by John Guillory, Nick Groom, Jack Lynch, and others.