Mock 4 – Renaissance to Victorian Criticism (Part 3)

Johnson called himself a Tory. He was a devout Anglican who 'refuted' Berkeley by kicking a stone ('I refute it thus').

Arnold's 'The Study of Poetry' (1880) takes 'high seriousness' from Aristotle's spoudaiotes. His touchstones include Milton, and he finds Chaucer lacking it.

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria ch. 18, answering Wordsworth's Preface, which denied any 'essential difference'.

Carlyle (On Heroes, Past and Present) laments a godless, heroless age; Ruskin's 'The Nature of Gothic' (The Stones of Venice) and Unto This Last condemn joyless labour and Mammon-worship.

Miller's 'The Critic as Host' (Deconstruction and Criticism, 1979) and de Man's 'Shelley Disfigured' both read The Triumph of Life.

Johnson: 'they only wrote verses'; 'they neither copied nature nor life'. Far from never being singular, 'their wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before'.

Note: The raw source key gave option 1; corrected per Johnson's text.

Hazlitt (1823) recalls hearing Coleridge preach at Shrewsbury in 1798 and visiting him and Wordsworth.

Criticism should be 'a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world' (1864).

Arnold (1880) warns against the historic and the personal estimate in favour of the 'real estimate'.

Sidney sets the poet above the moral philosopher (precept without example) and the historian (example without precept), since the poet joins both.

Note: The source key gives option 1 (religion); Sidney's comparison is with history, so this is corrected to option 3.

Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821): 'the mind in creation is as a fading coal'.

Sidney's Apology (c. 1580) and Shelley's Defence (1821) both answer Plato's banishment of the poets.

Sidney, An Apology for Poetry.

Life of Cowley: they wished 'to say what they hoped had been never said before', and their wit is 'a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike'.

Daniel (1603) → Johnson (1779) → Wordsworth (1800) → Eliot (1956).

Knights (1937); Trilling (The Liberal Imagination, 1950); Arnold (1880); Bradley's Oxford inaugural lecture (1901).

Sir Ernest Gowers (1954), from his Plain Words (1948) for the Treasury.

Sidney's three kinds: divine (David's Psalms), philosophical (Lucretius, Virgil's Georgics), and 'right poets' who imitate 'what may be and should be'.

Horace (c. 19 BCE); Dryden (1668); Daniel (1603), answering Campion; Jonson (posthumous, 1641).

Bacon (1605) → Johnson (1779–81) → Carlyle (1841) → Darwin (1859).

Horace wrote unrhymed quantitative verse, and Sidney held that verse is 'but an ornament and no cause to poetry'. Daniel's Defence of Rhyme argues the opposite.

Johnson's 'Life of Milton', quoting a critic approvingly: blank verse that has neither 'the easy flow of prose' nor 'the melody of numbers'.

Hazlitt on Coleridge, whom he heard preach at Shrewsbury in 1798.

Great art adds to good form a noble matter, as in 'the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible' ('Style', Appreciations, 1889).