Was Johnson a Poet?

Browsing in the Johnson Society's 2023 Transactions, I found a piece with this arresting title. It's a transcript of the year's Presidential Address, delivered at the Guildhall in Lichfield by the Society's new President (succeeding Posy Simmonds), Robert DeMaria, Jr, professor of English at Vassar and an eminent Johnsonian scholar. 'Was Johnson a poet?' he asks, acknowledging that it seems 'a very irreverent question' – and a very unlikely one to come from the man who recently finished editing the Longman's Annotated English Poets edition of Johnson's poetry. However, it's a question that was asked of Johnson in his time – and not only of Johnson but of others, including even Alexander Pope: in his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, the literary critic Joseph Warton concluded that the leading poet of his age was not a true poet at all, but rather a 'man of wit'. He was not alone in denigrating Pope – Mary Wortley Montagu thought him 'thoroughly mechanical' – but Johnson was having none of it. His life of Pope is the longest, and one of the best, in the Lives of the Poets, and in it Johnson answers the question 'Was Pope a poet?' with another question: 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' Where indeed.
  The charge sheet against Johnson was that much of his verse is not original, but comes in the form of translations and 'imitations'; that poetry was not his main vocation but a small part of his literary output; and that his method of composition was insufficiently rigorous. Johnson was one of those writers who (in his own words) 'employ at once memory and invention, and, with little intermediate use of the pen, form and polish large masses by continued meditation, and write their productions only when, in their own opinion, they have completed them.' This was altogether too coarse and unrefined, too easy a method for the more fastidious eighteenth-century critics, who preferred evidence of close work and high polish. For them, Johnson's method of composition was the mark of the mere 'versifier' rather than the 'true poet'.
  Was Johnson a poet? Of course he was, by modern standards – by any sane standards. Indeed, if the author of The Vanity of Human Wishes and London be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?