Thomson and Young were almost as famous in their own age as Pope himself. Their poetry, moreover, was not regarded by their contemporaries as radically different from Pope’s poetry. Both Thomson and Young acknowledged Pope’s achievement and were in turn appreciated for their work by Pope and his circle. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, there emerged a group of young poets (Joseph and Thomas Warton, William Collins, Mark Akenside among them), who consciously defined their poetic stance in opposition to Pope and the neo-classical tradition. Their position is perhaps most clearly expressed in Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756). In this essay, which can be regarded as the manifesto of this new school of poets, Warton acknowledges Pope’s greatness in his own poetic mode, but stresses that this is not the highest mode of poetry. He identifies Pope as a poet of “familiar life”, that is, of the social reality of his day, which he considers a lesser sort of poetry. The highest kind of poetry, in opposition to this, is the poetry of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton; a poetry which emanates from a “creative and glowing imagination” of “exalted and very uncommon character,” and aspires to the “transcendently sublime and prophetic”. In contrast to Pope’s poetry of rationalism, therefore, the main criterion of genuine poetry for the mid-century poets is that it should be the work of the imagination.