Literature Network » Samuel Taylor Coleridge

IN PRAISE OF POETRY'S HUMANE POWER

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 20020526
Author:Adam Kirsch

The poet-critic has been a supremely influential figure in English literature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theories on the difference between fancy and imagination helped to define the Romantic period; T. S. Eliot's call for complex, difficult writing was fulfilled in Modernism. What these poets had in common, along with Matthew Arnold and Samuel Johnson and others, was a certain assertiveness about what poetry is and should be. This willingness to go out on a limb in defense of their vision of poetry exposed the great poet-critics to error and obsolescence, but it was a risk they were willing ...

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