Editing Philip James Bailey (section)

== Works ==
Bailey is known almost exclusively by his one voluminous poem, ''Festus'', first published anonymously in 1839, and then expanded with a second edition in 1845. A vast pageant of theology and philosophy, it comprised in some twelve divisions an attempt to represent the relation of God to man, and to postulate "a gospel of faith and reason combined."

Among the admirers of ''Festus'' was [[Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson|Tennyson]]. [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]] imitated it in ''The Golden Legend'' (1851). Bailey himself described his approach with the neologism "omnist".<ref>{{cite book|author=Herbert F. Tucker|title=Epic : Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CXeybhiRmagC&pg=PA344|year=2008|publisher=OUP Oxford|isbn=978-0-19-923298-7|page=344}}</ref> [[Margaret Fuller]] was an enthusiast for the work, if with critical reservations.<ref>{{cite book|author=Meg McGavran Murray|title=Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OMoyQSD1A-cC&pg=PA230|year=2008|publisher=University of Georgia Press|isbn=978-0-8203-3659-6|page=230}}</ref>

The subsequent poems of Bailey, ''The Angel World'' (1850), ''The Mystic'' (1855), ''The Age'' (1858), and ''The Universal Hymn'' (1867), were failures. The author then incorporated large extracts of these into the later editions of ''Festus'', which ultimately extended to over 40,000 lines when the final edition was published in 1889. At one time his work was immensely popular, admired for its 'fire of imagination' ([[Elizabeth Barrett Browning]]), but, like the other works of the [[Spasmodic poets|Spasmodic school]] of which Bailey was considered the father, it is now little read.<ref>The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th Edition. Edited by Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 2000 Pp59</ref>

In 2021, [[Edinburgh University Press]] published a critical edition of ''Festus'', edited by [[Mischa Willett]].<ref>{{Cite web|title=Philip James Bailey, Festus|url=https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-philip-james-bailey-festus.html|access-date=2021-10-27|website=edinburghuniversitypress.com|language=en}}</ref>