By Samuel Johnson
'If a guy is to write down A Panegyrick, he could maintain vices out of sight; but when he professes to write down A existence, he needs to symbolize it fairly because it was.'
In the final of his significant writings, Samuel Johnson regarded again over the former centuries of English Literature on the way to describe the personalities in addition to the achievements of the best English poets. the most important Lives - of Milton, Dryden, quick, and Pope - are memorable cameos of the lifetime of writing within which Johnson is as responsive to human frailty as to literary prowess. The shorter Lives shield a few of Johnson's such a lot piercing, severe decisions.
Unsentimental, opinionated, and quotable, The Lives of the Poets maintains to steer the reputations of the writers involved. it truly is one of many maximum works of English feedback, but in addition the most humanly diverting.
This collection of the Lives of ten of crucial poets attracts its textual content from Roger Lonsdale's authoritative entire version.
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Extra resources for The Lives of the Poets (Oxford World's Classics)
Sample text
Something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 83). ’’ They ‘‘make their appearance in the remotest times,’’ he continues, and ‘‘some of them . . cannot any more shew themselves in this world’’ (On Heroes, p. 133). Thus he, too, describes modernity as loss, absence, cessation – in other words, as disenchantment. Yet, having made this point, Carlyle proceeds to argue that it is possible for modern writing, even print produced for the marketplace, to become heroic when it presents itself as a prophetic voice.
At any given moment during the nineteenth century, many different forms of voice struggled and interacted with English print culture. By turning ‘‘speech’’ into a place-holder for rational debate, Habermas renders it monolithic and homogeneous. He inevitably simplifies speech, so intent is he on proving its turn from good to bad. But speech in the nineteenth century can no more be reduced to critical debate and rational conversation than print culture can be reduced to essays in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.
The repeated murder of a storyteller or a doomed speaker, a figure that Victorian fiction in fact conjured up to authenticate itself, is the curious tropology by which fiction after Dickens lays claim to the authority to forge communities where mechanization had silenced speakers. A VOICE IN WRITING I argue in this book that the Victorian novel indicates in many different ways that there must be a speaker – who is, paradoxically, at once a pathetic ‘‘poor, crushed, human creature’’ and irresistibly powerful and charismatic – at Mythologies of the storyteller 29 the origin of its language.