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:
“who lives on, lives on
like the wings of an Atlantic seagull.
Though he has stopped flying,
the wings go on flapping
despite it all,
despite it all.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)