A History of English Literature

Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774) was, like Dryden, Addison, Gay and Johnson, an Augustan all-rounder, writing an an ...

Frances Burney Frances Burney Frances Burney (1752–1840), also known as ‘Fanny’, wrote from the age of ten, and had transcribed ...

spoke. He spoke for six hours in the trial of Warren Hastings. Oratory led to office, and he then divided his public career, as ...

anthologies often include the curious and delightful ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey’, a section of the unpublished Jubilat ...

Cowper discovered that walking was beneficial. He conducts our eye through the scene: Here Ouse, slow winding through a level pl ...

Edinburgh’s taverns. The farm failing, Burns took a post in the Excise, collecting taxes for the Crown. Expanded Poems were publ ...

a single man’. At times, however, Burns teams up his ‘Scottish Dialect’ with non- dialect words, as in the fourth word in the fi ...

Overview English Romantic literature is overwhelmingly a poetic one, with six major poets writing in the first quarter of the 19 ...

shared Milton’s hope that paradise might be restored by politics, he came to regard the political radicals, his allies, as blind ...

(without mention of Coleridge). The quality and impact of the best poems were such that lyric poetry and imaginative literature ...

The idea of the American Revolution excited European intellectuals. French Romantics were radical and liberal, but English Roman ...

rightly praised his ability to face the worst with terrible calm – as in ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, which attains moral gra ...

Coleridge’s earlier Frost at Midnight was a model for Tintern, giving landscaped reflection a new poetic intensity and psychic d ...

either of its elaborated versions, it is the most worthwhile long poem of the 19th century (Byron’s Don Juan being the most ente ...

The noise of wood and water, and the mist That on the line of each of those two roads Advanced in such indísputable shapes; All ...

Biographia Literaria, whereas the poet imitates the divine creativity by the power of primary Imagination. This is the centre of ...

never provided the happy ending he intended. The innocent Christabel is possessed by a beautiful demon, in spite of the poem’s ‘ ...

poetically it could not vie with the Lyrical Ballads.’ Scott followed up its huge success with other verse-romances including Ma ...

chiefly displays his sensibility via a travelogue. ‘Europe he saw’, wrote Pope of an earlier milord on his Grand Tour, ‘and Euro ...

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan, We all have seen him in the pantom ...