Critical Essays of the Early Nineteenth Century (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 edition. Excerpt: ... at poetry have had upon our literature. If any great national or natural convulsion could or should overwhelm your country, in such sort as to sweep Great Britain from the kingdoms of the earth, and leave only that, after all, the most living of human things, a dead language, to be studied and read, and imitated by the wise of future and far generations, upon foreign shores; if your literature should become the learning of mankind, divested of party cabals, temporary fashions, and national pride and prejudice; an Englishman, anxious that the posterity of strangers should know that there had been such a thing as a British epic and tragedy, might wish for the preservation of Shakespeare and Milton; but the surviving world would snatch Pope from the wreck, and let the rest sink with the people. He is the moral poet of all civilization; and as such, let us hope that he will one day be the national poet of mankind. He is the only poet that never shocks; the only poet whose faultlessness has been made his reproach. Cast your eye over his productions; consider their extent, and contemplate their variety: --pastoral, passion, mock-heroic, translation, satire, ethics, --all excellent, and often perfect. If his great charm be his melody, how comes it that foreigners adore him, even in their diluted translations? But I have made this letter too long.--Give my compliments to Mr. Bowles. Yours ever, very truly, Byron. A DEFENCE OF POETRY Percy Bysshe Shelley In 1820 Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock published in Ollier's Literary Miscellany a paradoxical essay called "The Four Ages of Poetry." He sent a copy of it to the poet, who took it perhaps rather more seriously than the author intended, and in March, 1821, wrote to Peacock: "I dispatch by...