A History of English LiteratureFletcher, Robert Huntington
History
A History of English Literature
Fletcher, Robert Huntington
English literature -- History and criticism
Even during this its greatest period, however, Romanticism had for a time a
hard battle to fight, and a chief literary fact of the period was the
founding and continued success of the first two important English literary
and political quarterlies, 'The Edinburgh Review' and 'The Quarterly
Review,' which in general stood in literature for the conservative
eighteenth century tradition and violently attacked all, or almost all, the
Romantic poets. These quarterlies are sufficiently important to receive a
few words in passing. In the later eighteenth century there had been some
periodicals devoted to literary criticism, but they were mere
unauthoritative booksellers' organs, and it was left for the new reviews to
inaugurate literary journalism of the modern serious type. 'The Edinburgh
Review,' suggested and first conducted, in 1802, by the witty clergyman and
reformer Sydney Smith, passed at once to the hands of Francis (later Lord)
Jeffrey, a Scots lawyer who continued to edit it for nearly thirty years.
Its politics were strongly liberal, and to oppose it the Tory 'Quarterly
Review' was founded in 1808, under the editorship of the satirist William
Gifford and with the coöperation of Sir Walter Scott, who withdrew for the
purpose from his connection with the 'Edinburgh.' These reviews were
followed by other high-class periodicals, such as 'Blackwood's Magazine,'
and most of the group have maintained their importance to the present day.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. The poets Wordsworth and Coleridge are of special
interest not only from the primary fact that they are among the greatest of
English authors, but also secondarily because in spite of their close
personal association each expresses one of the two main contrasting or
complementary tendencies in the Romantic movement; Coleridge the delight in
wonder and mystery, which he has the power to express with marvelous poetic
suggestiveness, and Wordsworth, in an extreme degree, the belief in the
simple and quiet forces, both of human life and of Nature.
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