"The Spirit of the Age The Spirit of the Age (full title ""The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits"") is a collection of character sketches by the early 19th century English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator William Hazlitt, portraying 25 men, mostly British, whom he believed to represent significant trends in the thought, literature, and politics of his time. The subjects include thinkers, social reformers, politicians, poets, essayists, and novelists, many of whom Hazlitt was personally acquainted with or had encountered. Originally appearing in English periodicals, mostly ""The New Monthly Magazine"" in 1824, the essays were collected with"
"several others written for the purpose and published in book form in 1825. ""The Spirit of the Age"" was one of Hazlitt's most successful books. It is frequently judged to be his masterpiece, even ""the crowning ornament of Hazlitt's career, and ... one of the lasting glories of nineteenth-century criticism."" Hazlitt was also a painter and an art critic, yet no artists number among the subjects of these essays. His artistic and critical sensibility, however, infused his prose style—Hazlitt was later judged to be one of the greatest of English prose stylists as well—enabling his appreciation of portrait painting to"
"an English essayist, best known for his ""Confessions of an English Opium-Eater"" (1821), an autobiographical account of his laudanum use and its effect on his life. William Hazlitt (1778–1830), friend of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, is another important essayist at this time, though today he is best known for his literary criticism, especially ""Characters of Shakespeare's Plays"" (1817–18). The second generation of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron (1788–1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats (1795–1821). Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three, preferring ""the brilliant wit of Pope to"
"against its harshest assailants. Hazlitt was known to have been badly affected by one notable review, that of Francis Jeffrey, himself one of the ""spirits of the age"", who published his assessment of ""The Spirit of the Age"" in the April 1825 issue of the ""Edinburgh Review"", which Hazlitt did not see until September. Jeffrey, who had boosted Hazlitt's reputation considerably in 1817 with his favourable reception of ""Characters of Shakespear's Plays"", was far less kind to this book. He praised the book's frequently brilliant ideas and Hazlitt's ""being an advocate of human liberty and improvement"". But he also chastised"
"published several collections of writing on topics such as Shakespearean criticism, politics and literature. In 1819, following the hostile reception of his ""Political Essays"" by the Tory press and the repressive legislation introduced after the Peterloo Massacre, Hazlitt foreswore writing further essays on political subjects. It should be noted that political insight is by no means absent from Hazlitt's subsequent works, and publications such as ""The Spirit of the Age"" (1825) condemn figures such as Robert Southey for their abandonment of political radicalism, while Hazlitt's biography of Napoleon (four volumes; 1828–1830) aimed to defend his reputation against a biography from"
"of an English Opium-Eater"" (1821), Essayist William Hazlitt (1778–1830), friend of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, is best known today for his literary criticism, especially ""Characters of Shakespeare's Plays"" (1817–18). The second generation of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron (1788–1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats (1795–1821). Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three, preferring ""the brilliant wit of Pope to what he called the 'wrong poetical system' of his Romantic contemporaries"". Byron achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe and Goethe called Byron ""undoubtedly the greatest genius of our"
"unified masterpiece of criticism, itself a work of art, with an impact far more than ephemeral, and exerting an influence on the literature of the later 19th century and beyond. Shortly following Hazlitt's death, the general idea of the book was emulated by books and articles with similar or identical titles, such as ""The Spirit of the Age"" (a series in ""The Examiner"", 1831), by John Stuart Mill, and ""A New Spirit of the Age"" (1844), by R. H. Horne. The book's influence also took other forms less direct or obvious. For example, Hazlitt's critique of Jeremy Bentham and his"
"and writer ... ."" Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) was a Scottish poet and the editor of the ""New Monthly Magazine"", where several of the essays that were later incorporated into ""The Spirit of the Age"" were first published. With the 1799 publication of his poem ""The Pleasures of Hope"", written in the formal language and rhymed couplets characteristic of an earlier period (though also with some traits of the emerging Romantic period), Campbell was catapulted into fame, becoming one of the most popular poets of the day, far more so than his Romantic contemporaries Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose ""Lyrical Ballads"" had"
"expense an 87-page pamphlet, ""A Letter to William Gifford, Esq."", a ferocious attack on the character and methods of Gifford. Though the latter's reviews had already done irreparable damage to Hazlitt's career, Hazlitt's ""Letter"" was highly appreciated by many of kindred political sympathies, including Leigh Hunt, Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse, and, most notably, the poet John Keats, who hailed it as ""'written in a style of genius'"". By the time Hazlitt penned ""The Spirit of the Age"" five years later, he had cooled somewhat but still produced a portrait of Gifford that was laced throughout with satire. Hazlitt introduces"
"(mostly segregated as ""Unascribed"") and is missing a dozen poems likely to be Wyatt's. Critical opinions of his work have varied widely. Thomas Warton, the 18th-century critic, considered Wyatt ""confessedly an inferior"" to his contemporary Henry Howard, and that Wyatt's ""genius was of the moral and didactic species and be deemed the first polished English satirist"". The 20th century saw an awakening in his popularity and a surge in critical attention. C. S. Lewis called him ""the father of the Drab Age"" (i.e. the unornate), from what Lewis calls the ""golden"" age of the 16th century, while others see his"
"would appear in Hazlitt's lifetime. Four of the essays that made it into the first edition of ""The Spirit of the Age"", plus part of another, had appeared, without authorial attribution, in the series ""The Spirits of the Age"", in the following order: ""Jeremy Bentham"", ""Rev. Mr. Irving"", ""The Late Mr. Horne Tooke"", ""Sir Walter Scott"", and ""Lord Eldon"", in ""The New Monthly Magazine"" for 1824 in the January, February, March, April, and July issues, respectively. In the book first published in January 1825, these essays, with much additional material, appeared as follows: ""Jeremy Bentham"", ""William Godwin"", ""Mr. Coleridge"", ""Rev."
"was judged to be ""one of the most passionately written pieces of prose in the late Romantic period"". Another article written in this period, ""On the Pleasure of Hating"" (1823; included in ""The Plain Speaker""), is on one level a pure outpouring of spleen, a distillation of all the bitterness of his life to that point. He links his own vitriol, however, to a strain of malignity at the core of human nature: The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse"
"an increasing body of admirers ""of late years"". This will save him from ""becoming the God of his own idolatry!"" The 20th-century critic Christopher Salvesen notes that Hazlitt's observation in ""The Spirit of the Age"" that Wordsworth's poetry is ""synthetic"" characterises it best, and Roy Park in an extensive study expresses the view that Hazlitt, as the poet's contemporary, most completely understood the essence of his poetry as a significant component of the ""spirit of the age"". Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), widely admired as one of the most learned men in Europe, was a Scottish lawyer, legislator, educator, philosopher, historian,"
"""Spirit of the Age"", by Francis Jeffrey, in which the latter takes him to task for striving too hard after originality. As much as Hazlitt respected Jeffrey, this hurt (perhaps the more because of his respect), and Hazlitt, to work off his angry feelings, dashed off the only verse from his pen that has ever come to light, ""The Damned Author's Address to His Reviewers"", published anonymously on 18 September 1825, in the ""London and Paris Observer"", and ending with the bitterly sardonic lines, ""And last, to make my measure full,/Teach me, great J[effre]y, to be dull!"" Much of his"
"The Palace of Pleasure The Palace of Pleasure is a poem by James Henry Leigh Hunt published in his 1801 collection ""Juvenilia"". Written before he was even sixteen, the work was part of a long tradition of poets imitating Spenser. ""The Palace of Pleasure"" is an allegory based on Book II of Edmund Spenser's ""The Faerie Queene"" and describes the adventure of Sir Guyon as he is taken by airy sylphs to the palace of the ""Fairy Pleasure"". According to Hunt the poem ""endeavours to correct the vices of the age, by showing the frightful landscape that terminates the alluring"
"his study"", as well as ""Mr. Brougham ... Mr. Canning ... Mr. Coleridge ... and ... Lord Liverpool"" (Prime Minister at the time). Of these notable figures, only Lord Liverpool did not rate his own chapter in ""The Spirit of the Age"". But Irving's popularity, which Hazlitt suspected would not last, was a sign of another tendency of the age: ""Few circumstances show the prevailing and preposterous rage for novelty in a more striking point of view, than the success of Mr. Irving's oratory."" Part of Irving's appeal was due to the increased influence of evangelical Christianity, notes historian Ben"
"""Rape of the Lock"" and ""The Dunciad"" are masterpieces of the mock-epic genre. It was during this time that poet James Thomson (1700–48) produced his melancholy ""The Seasons"" (1728–30) and Edward Young (1681–1765) wrote his poem ""Night-Thoughts"" (1742). The second half of the 18th century is sometimes called the ""Age of Johnson"". Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson has been described as ""arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history"". After nine"
"Thomas Warton Thomas Warton (9 January 1728 – 21 May 1790) was an English literary historian, critic, and poet. From 1785 to 1790 he was the Poet Laureate of England. He is sometimes called ""Thomas Warton the younger"" to distinguish him from his father ""Thomas Warton the elder"". His most famous poem remains ""The Pleasures of Melancholy"", a representative work of the Graveyard poets. Warton was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, the son of poet Thomas Warton, the Elder, and younger brother of Joseph Warton. As a youngster, Warton demonstrated a strong predilection toward writing poetry, a skill he would continue"
"lent depth to his poetry. For example, Maynard Mack, the great Pope scholar of the mid- to late twentieth century, argued that Pope's moral vision demanded as much respect as his technical excellence. In the years 1953–1967 the definitive Twickenham edition of Pope's poems was published in ten volumes, including an index volume. Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was an 18th-century English poet. He is best known for his satirical verse, including ""Essay on Criticism"", ""The Rape of the Lock"" and ""The Dunciad"", and for his translation of Homer. He is the second-most frequently"
"his splenetic attacks on contemporaries like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Yet it was later noted how fair, even ""generous"" Hazlitt's treatment of these figures was. According to David Bromwich, Hazlitt was unique in his day, a ""representative observer"" whose observations on what lay ""directly before him"" were so objective as to have the effect of ""prophecy"". With its combination of critical analysis and personal sketches of notable figures captured ""in the moment"", Hazlitt in ""The Spirit of the Age"" laid the groundwork for much of modern journalism and to an extent even created a new literary form, the ""portrait essay"""
"way of ending ""The Spirit of the Age"" with a nod to Knowles ""anticlimactic"". When ""The Spirit of the Age"" appeared at the beginning of 1825, Hazlitt's reputation had been tarnished, and, according to biographer Duncan Wu, his ""name was dirt."" At the very least, he was frequently disparaged as, in the words of A. C. Grayling, an ""immoral and splenetic critic."" Yet the book sold very well and proved to be among the most popular of Hazlitt's books. Despite Hazlitt's unsavory reputation, reviews of ""The Spirit of the Age"" were far from entirely negative. The reviewer in ""The New"
"Etty was the first British artist to specialise in the nude, and the reaction of the lower classes to these paintings caused concern throughout the 19th century. Although his portraits of male nudes were generally well received, many critics condemned his repeated depictions of female nudity as indecent. ""Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm"" was inspired by a passage in Thomas Gray's poem ""The Bard"". The theme of ""The Bard"" was the English king Edward I's conquest of Wales, and a curse placed by a Welsh bard upon Edward's descendants after he ordered the execution of all"
"Thomas Hood Thomas Hood (23 May 1799 – 3 May 1845) was an English poet, author and humorist, best known for poems such as ""The Bridge of Sighs"" and ""The Song of the Shirt"". Hood wrote regularly for ""The London Magazine"", ""Athenaeum"", and ""Punch"". He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works. Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45. William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him ""the finest English poet"" between the generations of Shelley and Tennyson. Hood was the father of playwright and humorist Tom"
"(1878–1955), British Ambassador to Poland at the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1861, after two false starts in poetry and fiction, he made his first noteworthy appearance as a writer with ""The Season: a Satire"", which contained incisive lines, and was marked by some promise both in wit and observation. In 1870 he published a volume of criticism, ""The Poetry of the Period"", which was conceived in the spirit of satire, and attacked Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne in an unrestrained fashion. The book aroused some discussion at the time, but its judgments were extremely uncritical. As"
"a half afterward, in view of the warm reception Irving received from many other British literary eminences, critic Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky observed that Hazlitt, in this instance, turned out to be Irving's severest British critic. Another paragraph, not actually part of the essay on Lamb and Irving, is tacked on to the end of the English editions (but not the Paris edition) of ""The Spirit of the Age"", in which Hazlitt offers a few appreciative words about his friend James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862), an Irish-born actor and dramatist whose family had moved to England when he was a child. When Knowles"
"Manchester, where a peaceful demonstration seeking parliamentary reform was attacked by militia. The bookseller Richard Carlile had been found guilty of blasphemy by a jury in November, 1819 for printing an edition of ""The Age of Reason"" (1794-6) by Thomas Paine. The “Six Acts” had been promulgated in December which placed restrictions on public gatherings and freedom of the press. It was during this unstable political period in England in late 1819 when Shelley started writing ""A Philosophical View of Reform"". Shelley told John and Maria Gisborne on 6 November: ""I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey"
"""The Waste Land,"") and James Joyce. Below are a partial list of honours and awards received by T.S. Eliot or bestowed or created in his honour. These honours are displayed in order of precedence based on Eliot's nationality and rules of protocol, not awarding date. Source: T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot, (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965), was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and ""one of the twentieth century's major poets"". Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age"
"discussion of the relationship of a fictional world to the world it draws upon. In time, critics and biographers, looking back, observed how unbiased this book was, and the uncanncy accuracy with which Hazlitt weighed the relative importance of many of his subjects. Wordworth, for example, was not then regarded by the reading public as the major poet he later was; yet Hazlitt saw Wordsworth as the greatest poet of the day, the founder of a whole new ""original vein in poetry"". ""The Spirit of the Age"" also marked a notable change in attitude. Hazlitt had been frequently condemned for"
"Gallery, London. Logan Pearsall Smith Logan Pearsall Smith (18 October 1865 – 2 March 1946) was an American-born British essayist and critic. Harvard and Oxford educated, he was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and was an expert on 17th Century divines. His ""Words and Idioms"" made him an authority on correct English language usage. He wrote his autobiography, ""Unforgotten Years"", in 1938. Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey. He was the son of the prominent Quakers Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, and a descendant of James Logan, who was William Penn's secretary and the Chief Justice"
"should have been the grammar to have ""proceeded to [its] thirtieth edition"" and find a place in all the schools instead of ""Horne Tooke's genuine anatomy of the English tongue"" makes it seem, exclaims Hazlitt, ""as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be ""stereotyped!"". A century and a half later, critic John Kinnaird saw this essay on Horne Tooke as being essential to Hazlitt's implicit development of his idea of the ""spirit of the age"". Not only did Tooke's thinking partake of the excessive ""abstraction"" that was"
"Johnson. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Edmund Burke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote essays for the general public. The early 19th century, in particular, saw a proliferation of great essayists in English – William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey all penned numerous essays on diverse subjects. In the 20th century, a number of essayists tried to explain the new movements in art and culture by using essays (e.g., T.S. Eliot). Whereas some essayists used essays for strident political themes, Robert Louis Stevenson and Willa Cather wrote lighter essays. Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and Charles du"
"candour that he restricted their imaginative power. His identity had prevailed."" Ode on Indolence The ""Ode on Indolence"" is one of five odes composed by English poet John Keats in the spring of 1819. The others were ""Ode on a Grecian Urn"", ""Ode on Melancholy"", ""Ode to a Nightingale"" and ""Ode to Psyche"". The poem describes the state of indolence, a word which is synonymous with ""avoidance"" or ""laziness"". The work was written during a time when Keats was presumably more than usually occupied with his material prospects. After finishing the spring poems, Keats wrote in June 1819 that its"
"T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot, (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965), was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and ""one of the twentieth century's major poets"". Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American passport. Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem ""The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"" (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of the"