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Submitted by swaty31 on January 26, 2008
Category: Miscellaneous
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To acquaint ourselves with the spirit of Romanticism in England in the Nineteenth century we may turn to the prose works of the period along side the famous poetry of the age. The impetus gained by English prose in the Eighteenth century continued in this century, but with a distinct change in subject and tone. Unlike the coffee-table essays of the previous century, the form of essay that became popular in this age was the personal essay. This form was honed by the personal genius of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey, the three most famous and important essayists of the period, who used this form to express their variety of Romanticism. According to P. P. Howe, ‘A “romantic” writer concerned himself with expressing the “inner” or “essential” spirit of his age – a spirit he discovered through his imaginative participation in, or sympathy, with its various activities’.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) is perhaps the most important Romantic essayist, even though less popular than Charles Lamb, as in his essays we find the radical element, that identified the true romantic spirit and simultaneously a critical disposition, which made him an important commentator of the age. Influenced by the concise social commentary in Joseph Addison's eighteenth-century magazine, the Spectator, and by the personal tone of the essays of Michel de Montaigne, Hazlitt became one of the most celebrated practitioners of the "familiar" essay. Characterized by conversational diction and personal opinion on topics ranging from English poets to washerwomen, the style of Hazlitt's critical and autobiographical writings has greatly influenced methods of modern writing on aesthetics. His literary criticism, particularly on the Lake poets, has also provided readers with a lens through which to view the work of his Romantic contemporaries. Hazlitt described his essays as "experimental" rather than "dogmatical," in that he preferred to use the model of common...
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