To most literary historians, the name of Leigh Hunt does not rank very high: he is mostly known as an idiosyncratic and mediocre poet, a versatile but slightly superficial critic, a man who taxed his friends patience to the utmost, and probably most of all the man who exercised an evil influence on Keats. However, there is much more to Hunt than has hitherto been written about him. He was a voracious reader who had a well-developed literary taste, and was a true democrat in that he wanted the interested layman to share the enthusiasm which the reading and apprehension of poetry had given him....

The first decade of the 20th century witnessed a calling into question of some of the central positions held by the late 19th century Positivists. There was a shift of paradigm in science as well as art, as elicited by Einstein, William James, Freud, Picasso, Bergson and Pound. The insufficiency of the Positivist world picture became increasingly evident. Importantly, the concept of what was conventionally called reality, and legitimate ways of describing it, were being transformed. Fenollosa s long essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, was a ground-breaking, if...

Eliot s dictum about the objective correlative has often been quoted but rarely analysed. This book traces the maxim to some of its sources and places it in a contemporary context. Eliot agreed with Locke about the necessity of sensory input, but for a poet to be able to create poetry, the input has to be processed by the poet s intellect. Respect for control of feelings and order of presentation were central to Eliot s conception of literary criticism. The result the objective correlative is not one word, but a scene or a chain of events . Eliot s thinking was also inspired by late 19th...

Many of the ideas that appear in poet Matthew Arnold's Preface to the Poems of 1853 to his collection of poems and in his later essays are suggested in the letters that Arnold wrote to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough. Literature was, in Arnold's perception, meant to communicate a message rather than impress by its structure or by formal sophistication. Modern theories of coalescence between content and form were outside the contemporary paradigm. T. S. Eliot's ambivalent attitude to Arnold--at once reluctantly admiring and decidedly patronizing--is puzzling. Eliot never seemed...

Drawing on the author's teaching practice and experience, this book is based on the premise that reading and analyzing literary texts are rewarding pursuits. The target group is grammar school pupils and students at colleges of education and universities. Pedagogic theories are dealt with only in so far as they are applicable to the teaching situation. After establishing the distinction between fiction, which demands 'a willing suspension of disbelief', and non-fiction, which is set in the universe of the pupil's experience, succeeding chapters set out the benefits for the teaching of...