The Poets And Poetry Of England In The Nineteenth Century 1845

Author : Rufus W. Griswold
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781330780695
Total Pages : 628 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (86 download)

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Download or read book The Poets and Poetry of England, in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) written by Rufus W. Griswold and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-05 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Poets and Poetry of England, in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1 The rise and progress of English poetry form one of the most delightful and instructive chapters in the intellectual history of the world. We trace its glimmering dawn in the ballads of the early minstrels, its brilliant morning in the Canterbury Tales, and its rich and bold development in the literature of the age of Elizabeth, in which British genius reached an elevation unparalleled in the history of mankind. Bacon and Hobbes and Coke, Barrow and Taylor and Hooker, Raleigh and Selden and Sidney, Spenser and Shakspeare and Milton, breathed in the same generation the air of England, and though they did not all give a lyrical expression to thought and passion, they were nearly all poets, in the truest and highest sense of the word, and they formed with their contemporaries the most wonderful constellation of great men that ever adorned a nation or an age. It is a remark of Hume, that when arts come to perfection in a state they necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive there. In England the decline of poetry, was as rapid as had been its rise, and in the long interregnum which succeeded the Restoration, scarcely a work was produced which has an actual and enduring popularity. The artificial school introduced from the Continent by the followers of Charles the Second, attained its acme at last, however, in the polished numbers of Pope, and a gradual return to nature became visible in the productions of Thomson and Cowper and Burns, who ushered in the second great era of British literature, a general view of the poetical portion of which I have endeavoured to present in this volume. There is at the present time, it seems to me, great need of a work of this sort. The surveys and selections of English poetry from Chaucer to the close of the last century, are numerous, and some of them, especially those of Campbell and Hazlitt, are made with singular candour and discernment. But there has hitherto been no extensive review of the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, more rich and varied than that of all other periods, excepting only the golden one of Shakspeare. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.