Responses
The degree of candor that De Quincey brought to his portraits of people who were then still living or recently dead was extremely rare, if not unprecedented, in contemporaneous literature and journalism, and provoked strong negative reactions. In the mid-1830s, when the essays were being published, Southey called him "a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth" and "one of the greatest scoundrels living!"
Some interested parties, however, responded more calmly. Coleridge's daughter Sarah found De Quincey's treatment of her father to be insightful and generally fair.
Read more about this topic: Recollections Of The Lake Poets
Famous quotes containing the word responses:
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)
“Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)