Radical
He shared many ideas with radical writers of the time. His doctrine of benevolence advised a moral obligation to the poor, during a time when the interest in the lower classes was subsiding. He had an impact on authors such as William Godwin, but also gave critical and moral support to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
Nicholas Roe's chapter on Dyer in The politics of nature: Wordsworth and some contemporaries shows Dyer to have been an important model for Wordsworth and Coleridge in the way he brought politics to bear on the poetry of nature and imagination. Dyer's influence represents, for Roe the answer to current historians who believe that the Romantics turned their backs on history in their search for a transcendent nature. The poet thus seems to have revenged himself on claims of insignificance.
Read more about this topic: George Dyer (poet)
Famous quotes containing the word radical:
“Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“The radical changes in society from the small, well-considered hundreds to the countless thousands have of course destroyed the neighborly character of the strange conglomerate. It is more ornamental and much more luxurious now than then.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)