Philip James Bailey’s Festus is the most popular poem most people have never heard of. An epic in twenty cantos about the end of time in the Faustian mode, it all but dominated literary conversation in the early Victorian period and was hugely influential on authors now widely revered.

Early critical discussions of the poem were concerned not with the fact of its influence so much as the scope. F. B. Money-Coutts pleads, for example, in the periodical The Academy in 1901, that “not from any audience chamber ought this great, this conscientious prophet-poet to be dismissed without being fully heard” and that “Mr. Bailey’s life-work deserves, not an ephemeral comment, but a volume of earnest analysis.” The Athenæum avers in 1876 that “in the study of English poetry, it is always necessary to consider the influence of . . . Festus . . . upon most subsequent poetry.”

Always necessary? Most subsequent poetry? For readers like these, the quality of the poem was obvious and all but guaranteed it a place in posterity. An issue of The Saturday Review from 1889 contends, “the fact remains that schools of poetry rise and fall, one influence yields to another influence, and Mr. Bailey’s . . . poem rides every storm and survives every revolution of taste.” Festus achieved a reach the English-speaking world had not seen since Byron and has rarely seen since. The modern critic Richard Cronin writes that Festus “was recognized . . . rather widely, as the great poem of the age.” It is safe to say that most readers now, even most educated readers, have never so much as heard the name. What happened?