The myth constructs a scenario whereby Augustanism, the name by which critics refer to much of the literature produced between 1660 and Samuel Johnson's death in 1784, was rejected by the Romantics. In 1756, Joseph Warton published his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, which lamented Pope wrote ‘from and to the head rather than the heart’, neglecting the emotions. Warton saw Pope as ‘the great Poet of Reason’, but at a cost: his imagination was ‘withheld and stifled’. Like Blake, Wordsworth memorized swathes of Augustan verse, as late as 1839 boasting he could recite ‘several 1000 lines of Pope’. The myth exposes the limitations of taxonomic approaches to literature: it is as untrue to say that everyone during the early eighteenth century was an imitator of Pope as to suggest that everyone during the early nineteenth was Romantic.