Notes (Many of the critical essays discussed in this book are well known and relatively brief. Often they are available in various modern editions and anthologies. Where this is the case, page references or references to a particular edition have been omitted.) INTRODUCTION See J. W. H. Atkins, Literacy Criticism in Antiquity (Cambridge, 1934), I, pp. llff. 2 T. S. Eliot, 'Imperfect Critics', in The Sacred Wood (1920). 3 Paul Feyerabend, 'Consolations for the Specialist', in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 197ff. See also the contributions of Kuhn and Lakatos to the same volume. 1 SAMUEL JOHNSON: THE ACADEMY AND THE MARKET-PLACE Neoclassicism: Dryden and Pope 1 R. S. Crane, 'English Neoclassical Criticism: An Outline Sketch', in Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), pp. 372ff.; and 'On Writing the History of Criticism in England 1650-1800', in The Idea of the Humanities (Chicago, 1967), pp. 157ff. See also J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1966). 2 W. J. Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London, 1971), pp. 16ff. 3 Rene Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (New York, 1966), pp. 35-6. 4 Johnson, 'Life of Dryden'. 350 Notes 351 5 There are more serious grounds for the equivocating Augustan attitude to Shakespeare. A great work of art in the heyday of neoclassi­ cism existed less as an uplifting cultural monument than as a model to be copied. Shakespeare seemed a highly misleading model for the very reason that the possibility of imitating him was still there. Poetic drama still held the stage; it did not yet need to be revived in the poet's study out of piety towards a vanished heroic age. 6 George Watson, The Literary Critics (Harmondsworth, 1962), pp. 43-4. 7 Addison, Spectator no. 409 (19 June 1712). 8 Reported by Spence in the last year of Pope's life. This is mentioned by Ian Jack, Augustan Satire (Oxford, 1966), p. 5. Minim, the Dictionary and the Life of Savage 1 See the notes to the text in the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1963), II, pp. 185ff. 2 Johnson, Idler no. 76 (29 September 1759). 3 There are many anecdotes of this, particularly in Mrs Thrale 's memoir reprinted in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1897), I, pp. 141ff. 4 Boswell, Life ofJohnson (Oxford, 1953), p. 939. See alsop. 798. 5 See Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (London, 1972), pp. 183ff. 6 Johnson, Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). 7 Johnson, Idler no. 66 (21 July 1759). 8 See Johnson, Rambler nos 156 and 158 for classic statements of this. 9 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into ... the Sublime and Beautiful, 5th edn (London, 1767), p. 91. 10 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London, 1958), Introduction. 11 The phrase is from Fussell, Samuel Johnson. 12 Johnson, Rambler no. 93 (5 February 1751). 13 David Hume, 'Of the Standard of Taste' in Philosophical Works (Edinburgh, 1826), III, p. 263. Milton, Shakespeare and the Lives of the Poets 1 Johnson, Rambler, nos 2 (24 March 1750) and 106 (23 March 1751). 2 Johnson, journal entry for 2 April1779, in Yale Edition, I, p. 294. 3 Boswell, Life, p. 442. 4 Johnson, Rambler no. 208 (14 March 1752) and 'Preface to Shakes­ peare' respectively. 352 Authors and Authority 2 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: THE POET AS PROPHET Sublimity and transcendence: the later Eighteenth Century Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. John Oxenford (London, 1930), p. 32. The passage is quoted in Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, p. 6. 2 Cf. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1958), pp. 240ff. 3 Joan Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste (London, 1973), p. 65 . 4 Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, pp. 70ff. 5 Cf. Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970), p. 11. 6 Quoted in Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste, p. 175 . 7 Hume, 'Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences' in Philos­ ophical Works, III, p. 154. 8 E.g. Stephen A. Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York, 1943), p. 119. Larrabee argues that 'Blake accepted the Platonic elements of Neo-classical theory.' The Preface to Lyrical Ballads 1 See Stephen Gill, 'The Original Salisbury Plain', in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca, New York, 1970), pp. 142ft., for a text of this poem. 2 See E. P. Thompson, 'Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon', in Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien and William Dean Vanech (London, 1969), pp. 149ft.; and Kelvin Everest, Coler­ idge's Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795-1798 (Sussex and New York, 1979). 3 Hazlitt, 'On the Living Poets' in Lectures on the English Poets. 4 See W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic (Toronto and London, 1969), pp. 112-13. 5 Ibid., p. 12. 6 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter 18. 7 'An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spon­ taneously from the vital root of genius; its grows, it is not made; Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mecha­ nics, art, and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own' (Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition). 8 See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmonds­ worth, 1961), especially pp. 48ff. 9 Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion. Poetic power: Wordsworth and de Quincey 1 Owen, Wordsworth as Critic, p. 151. 2 Charles Lamb, review of The Excursion in Quarterly Review (1814), Notes 353 reprinted in Lamb's Criticism, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge, 1923), p. 106. 3 Shelley, Defence of Poetry, and de Quincey, Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, ed. John E. Jordan (London, 1961), p. 99. 4 Thomas de Quincey, 'Letters to a Young Man ... ', in Works (Edin­ burgh, 1863), XIII, p. 55. De Quincey's distinction was first put for­ ward in 1823 and elaborated in several other places. See especially the essays on Wordsworth (1839), Goldsmith (1848) and Pope (1848). 5 It was the utilitarians, however, who played a major part in the estab­ lishment of the study of literature in the universities. The irony of this has been noted by D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (London, 1965), p. 15. See also Chapter4 below. 3 THE ROMANTIC CRITICS Reviewers and Bookmen: from Jeffrey to Lamb Table-talk, recorded by T. Allsop, in Coleridge: Select Poetry and Prose, ed. Stephen Potter (London, 1962), p. 476. 2 The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (London, 1945), p. 910. 3 William Hazlitt, 'Mr. Jeffrey' in The Spirit of the Age. 4 J. 0. Hayden, Romantic Bards and British Reviewers (London, 1971), p. ix. 5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London, 1956), p. 34. (Hereafter as Biog. Lit.) 6 For discussion of this episode, see Coleridge's Shakespearean Criti­ cism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London, 1930), I, p. xxxi. (Hereafter as Shak. Crit.); and Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London, 1972), pp. 141ff. 7 Shak. Crit., II, p. 260n. 8 A. W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London, 1846), p. 343. 9 William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1931-3), VI, p. 176. 10 Shak. Crit., I, p. 140. 11 John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 23. 12 Shak. Crit., I, p. 200; Biog. Lit., p. 169. 13 Shak. Crit., I, p. 129. 14 Schlegel, Lectures, pp. 38ff. 15 Introduction to Jeffrey's Literary Criticism, ed. D. Nichol Smith (Lon­ don, 1910), p. xxi. 16 De Quincey, Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets , ed. John E. Jordan, pp. 172and 173. 354 Authors and Authority Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1 See John Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society (Oxford, 1959), pp. 52ff., for an account of Coleridge at this period. 2 Quoted by George Whalley, 'The Integrity of Biographia Literaria', Essays and Studies. VI n.s. (1953) , pp. 87ff. 3 Letter to Robert Southey, in Coleridge, Select Poetry and Prose, p. 728. 4 Biog. Lit., pp. xi iff. 5 See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (London, 1971), pp. 236ff. 6 Biog. Lit., p. 88. 7 For discussions of Schelling, Coleridge and pantheism, see J. Shaw­ cross's Introduction to his edition of Biographia Literaria (London, 1907); J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1965), p. 205; and Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969), which provides an exhaustive treatment of the whole question. For the religious tensions in Cole­ ridge's life and work as a whole, see William Empson's Introduction to Coleridge's Verse: A Selection, ed. William Empson and David Pirie (London, 1972). 8 J. R. de J. Jackson, Method and Imagination in Coleridge's Criticism (London, 1969), p. 115. For the orthodox view, see Shawcross, Bio­ graphia, p. lxvii. 9 McFarland, Coleridge, p. 308. 10 Biog Lit., p. 179. The reader may compare the discussions by Shaw­ cross, Appleyard and Jackson cited above. 11 Letter to Southey, in Coleridge, Select Poetry and Prose, p. 729. 12 See his lecture 'On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature', reprinted as an appendix to Herbert Read, The True Voice of Feeling (London, 1968). 13 Biog. Lit., p. 182. 14 Biog. Lit., p. 213. 15 Cf. Fruman, Coleridge, pp.