 |
  |
|
|
Revolution and Romanticism
|
||
A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 129 9 200 x 127 mm 38 pages |
WILLIAM HAZLITT My First Acquaintance with Poets 1823 Hazlitt was 20 when he was introduced to Coleridge; Coleridge was an avuncular 26. It was nearly twenty years later that Hazlitt started to write down his recollections of the year 1798, and another five before they achieved their final form, in John Hunt’s periodical The Liberal of 1823. He was now 45, with most of his great work as journalist and critic behind him; his marriage was over; his obsession with Sarah Walker had ended in humiliation. The power of this haunting memoir derives in great part from the older man looking back to the transfiguring experience of that summer of his early manhood. It is both biography and autobiography. His images of the two poets are unforgettable: Coleridge zigzagging across the path as he walked and talked, Wordsworth arriving at Nether Stowey ‘in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons’. Above all, My First Acquaintance is an account of conversation, of education, of intellectual revelation. £18 $35 The sense of a new style and a new spirit of poetry came over me. It had to me something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of spring. |
|
  |
||
