In his introduction to the Poetical Works (1809) of the eighteenth-century provincial poet and literary critic Anna Seward, Walter Scott claimed that her “peculiarities of taste” might not stand the test of time. In a sense, he was right. Seward occupies an anomalous place in literary history between the neoclassical and the Romantic periods. Her love of balanced heroic couplets and elaborate diction register as dated by the 1780s, while her favorite poetic topics, the natural world and local culture, lead some to describe her as a precursor of the Romantics. In the late eighteenth century, before the barriers between these literary periods were constructed, Seward was a respected poet and literary critic whose essays appeared frequently in The Gentleman's Magazine. Her contemporaries attributed to her the invention of two new genres: the “poetical novel” with Louisa (1784) and the “epic elegy” exemplified in her Monody on Major Andre (1781); wildly popular, these poems went through multiple editions. Today, her generic innovations read like literary artifacts. Seward's popularity, like her experiments with genre, faded quickly. At the turn of the century, the acclaim she garnered for her poetry as well as the dramatic readings she undertook in the salons of Lady Anna Miller of Batheaston during the 1770s and 1780s disappeared. She became an anachronism. Her taste for ornate language, complex verse forms, and public readings were judged to be outmoded affectations. Although she was a great friend and promoter of Robert Southey, her more sociable brand of poetic practice drew his derision. He recounts the poetess greeting him in 1808 with an extemporaneous and “theatrical” reading of an encomium she had just written to his verse. He describes the whole meeting as “tragic-comic or comicotragic” and confesses that he was almost unable to stifle his laughter during Seward's performance. Seward's taste for artifice and verbal complexity, which was inherited, according to Scott, from her friend the poet and doctor Erasmus Darwin, also came under attack. Scott took issue with her preference for “florid description … lofty metaphor … bold personification … [and] diction which inversion and the use of compound epithets rendered as remote as possible from the tone of ordinary language … too remote from common life, and natural expression, to retain its popularity.”