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Samuel Johnson (1434 words) |
 | English poet, essayist, critic, journalist, lexicographer, conversationalist, regarded as one of the outstanding figures of 18th-century life and letters. |
| The writer Ford Madox Ford has considered Johnson the most tragic figures of English literature, "whose still living writings are always ignored, a great honest man who will remain forever a figure of half fun because of the leechlike adoration of the greatest and most ridiculous of all biographers. |
| Johnson's biographical essays of English poets were published in 1781 as THE LIVES OF THE POETS. |
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CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: English Literature (11531 words) |
| His great dictionary is philology with an autobiographical flavour; his lives of the poets are partly biographical, but mainly critical, while criticism fills a good space in his edition of Shakespeare. |
| Living the most retired of lives, and not writing much until over fifty years of age, he has left a body of poetry marked with his own gentle, affectionate, humorous, and sometimes tragic genius, much of which has become classic in English. |
| On these two poets when young men, as well as on Southey and others, the altruistic philosophy of the French revolutionary movement had a profound effect, and in Wordsworth's "Prelude" we may see to some extent the extraordinary and stimulating influence of these ideas upon some of the young and generous English minds. |
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