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:
“Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)