The Lives
The Lives, which were critical as well as biographical studies, appeared as prefaces to selections of each poet's work, and they were quite larger than originally expected. As Johnson justified in the advertisement for the work, "my purpose was only to have allotted to every Poet an Advertisement, like those which we find in the French Miscellanies, containing a few dates and a general character." However, he did not limit himself to a dry series of dates and biography, but created a series of Lives with, according to his 1783 edition Preface, "the honest intention of giving pleasure".
Read more about this topic: Lives Of The Most Eminent English Poets
Famous quotes containing the word lives:
“Vices may be said to await us along the course of our lives like hosts with whom we lodge successively on a journey; and I doubt that experience would cause us to avoid them, if we could travel the same road twice.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at self-possession.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)