A to Z
Ian Hamilton
- Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt
Weidenfeld, 960 pp, £22.00, October 1998, ISBN 0 297 84014 2 - A Critical Difference: T.S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919-28 by David Goldie
Oxford, 232 pp, £35.00, October 1998, ISBN 0 19 812379 5
Yalden, Hammond, Stepney, Fenton (Elijah) and Hughes (John): where are you now? Ten of the 52 poets represented in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets fail to make an appearance in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. On its own, of course, this doesn’t prove a thing. At the same time I would guess that these poets are known about today – if they are known about today – simply because they were once biographised by Dr Johnson. Thanks to Johnson, and thanks also to the Dunciad, it has not been easy for minor figures of the 18th century to achieve absolute literary-historical oblivion. Fenton, Hughes et al do seem to have got closer to the final darkness than most other dunces of their day. Let us remember them for that.
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Vol. 21 No. 5 · 4 March 1999 » Ian Hamilton » A to Z (print version)
pages 22-23 | 2641 words