Critics enamoured of James Boswell's Life of Johnson have too frequently overlooked the empathy Samuel Johnson's work reveals toward women and other creatures of nature caught in the patriarchal web of eighteenth century domination. This dissertation focuses on Johnson's youthful poetry beginning with his earliest verse, "On a Daffodill," and concluding with London, his first major poem. These selections reveal his inability to resolve his role as a functioning male in a repressive society which discourages his desire for direct and nurturing relationships with women and nature that deal, not with heroic abstractions, but with personal involvement
