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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Johnson as Biographer

  • Edited by Greg Clingham, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson
    Published online:
    22 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022, pp 178-190

  • Summary

    Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are a classic not only of literary criticism but of biography as well. Originally intended as brief prefaces in an anthology of fifty-eight poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they increased in scope as Johnson worked on them, and as one commentator has said, they became “a book of wisdom and experience … a commentary on human destiny.” The lives of Milton, Swift, Dryden, and Pope are really books in their own right, and the earlier Life of Savage is a deeply felt account of someone Johnson knew well in his youth. He made good use of such documentary material as he was able to obtain, and for recent poets was able to draw upon his own memory of telling anecdotes. Above all, the Lives explore the range of human achievement, its failures and also its triumphs.