Lectures on the English Poets Delivered at the Surrey Institution

Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
413K words
Chapters
42

Tags

English Originals Literary Appreciation Portrait GalleryLiterary GiantsHumanistic CareWestern ThoughtScholar's EssaysIntellectual CommentaryLiterary CriticismPoetry AppreciationTraditional AestheticsMusical Rhythm

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Lectures on the English Poets; Delivered at the Surrey Institution by HazlittAuthor: Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jul 5, 2005

Editor's review

This collection of lectures brings together the series Hazlitt, a critic of the English Romantic era, delivered at the Surrey Institution. It ranges over Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and other English poets, presenting the critic's judgments and likes and dislikes in the lively tone of oral delivery. Its value lies not in offering safe, balanced conclusions about literary history but in displaying a mode of appreciation that carries the warmth of a living voice: Hazlitt excels at using metaphor and contrast to bring a poet's temperament, verbal texture, and the spirit of the age before the reader's eyes. His arguments are sharp and his praise and blame are candid, so reading him often brings the pleasure of being persuaded or provoked to your face. As an important nineteenth-century English critical text, it can help readers build a basic sense of the lineage of English poetry and also serve as a sample for observing Romantic critical ideas. It is best read as an opinionated guide rather than a reference book, suited to being savored alongside the original works of the poets discussed, so as to appreciate the literary quality of the critical language itself.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with chapters on poets you already know, and check Hazlitt's judgments against the original works
  2. Read the lectures as essays, noting their metaphors and contrasts and appreciating the charm of the critical language itself
  3. For unfamiliar poets, read a representative original work first, then return to the lecture, so as not to remember only the conclusions

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42

FAQ

Can I read this book directly without any foundation in English poetry? You can, but the gain will be reduced. The lectures assume readers already have a basic impression of poets such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton and quote and compare them frequently. If they are entirely unfamiliar, it is best to read one or two anthologies of English poetry first, or start with the lecture chapters discussing Shakespeare, and then expand gradually.
Is this book a systematic textbook of English poetry history? No. It is a collection of lectures, unfolding poet by poet, with strong personal appreciation and praise and blame, and it does not aim for complete chronology or balanced material. It is suitable as an opinionated guide and a model of criticism; to master poetry history systematically, you still need to pair it with formal literary histories.
What should I pay attention to when reading the electronic edition? This is a public-domain electronic text in nineteenth-century English, with many long sentences and allusions. It is advisable to use reading software with a dictionary look-up function and to slow down. The lecture-style paragraphs are long, so you can read section by section according to poet chapters; briefly recording your own disagreements afterward will improve the effect.

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About the author

Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830 Author

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was an English essayist and literary critic. Details of his life are limited in publicly available sources, so this entry presents his writing mainly through the works held in the collection. Twelve of his works are included, among them Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits, Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners, Lectures on the English Poets, and the multi-volume Collected Works of William Hazlitt. His essays range widely across literary criticism, character sketches, and observations of social manners. His style is direct and argumentative, and he is skilled at connecting particular works with questions of character. His criticism has had a lasting influence on later English literary appreciation and essay writing.