/lit/ - Literature

>>13000000
oh... oh NO

>>12992864
Johnson's preface to his edition of Shakespeare should be stapled to the forehead of every idiot in every Classics and English department who complains that the Canon isn't "diverse" enough.

>>12841198
This is neat, check this out:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2013/07/28/lecture-johnson-and-boswell/

This board needs to read more Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson's criteria for whether a work is great or not is if it remains popular long after anyone could derive any advantage from promoting it. Basically, long after the author and anyone who knows him or is related to him is dead. The whole reason the Canon exists is because it's made up of works exactly like this: works that have lasted.

So it's silly to try to add to the Canon. The Canon will add to itself, over time. Nobody can force things into the Canon.

>>12525082

>ridicules trans people for high suicide rates
>will make a /lit/ post asking for depression help books next week
>thinks no one cares about him because he's a white man

Why haven't you read the Rambler essays yet, /lit/?

I can't help but think of the Aeneid as inferior to Homer, precisely because in so many instances Virgil sets out to imitate Homer, to make homages to him, at the cost of originality.

Samuel Johnson has affected my thinking on this:

>The warmest admirers of the great Mantuan poet can extol him for little more than the skill with which he has, by making his hero both a traveller and a warrior, united the beauties of the Iliad and Odyssey in one composition: yet his judgment was perhaps sometimes overborn by his avarice of the Homeric treasures; and, for fear of suffering a sparkling ornament to be lost, her has inserted it where it cannot shine with its original splendor.

>Whens Ulysses visited the infernal regions, he found, among the heroes that perished at Troy, his competitor Ajax, who, when the arms of Achilles were adjudged to Ulysses, died by his own hand in the madness of disappointment. He still appeared to resent, as on earth, his loss and disgrace. Ulysses endeavoured to pacify him with praises and submission; but Ajax walked away without reply. This passage has always been considered as eminently beautiful; because Ajax, the haughty chief, the unlettered soldier, of unshaken courage, of immoveable constancy, but without the power of recommending his own virtues by eloquence, or enforcing his assertions by any other argument than the sword, had no way of making his anger known, but by gloomy sullenness, and dumb ferocity.

>His hatred of a man whom he conceived to have defeated him only by volubility of tongue, was therefore naturally shewn by silence more contemptuous and piercing than any words that so rude an orator could have found, and by which he gave his enemy no opportunity of exerting the only power in which he was superior.

>When Aeneas is sent by Virgil to the shades, he meets Dido the queen of Carthage, whom his perfidy had hurried to the grave; he accosts her with tenderness and excuses; but the lady turns away like Ajax in mute disdain. She turns away like Ajax, but she resembles him in none of those qualities which give either dignity or propriety to silence. She might, without any departure from the tenour of her conduct, have burst out like other injured women into clamour, reproach, and denunciation; but Virgil had his imagination full of Ajax, and therefore could not prevail on himself to teach Dido any other mode of resentment.

I think this thread might have broader appeal of we talked about the English Enlightenment in general. There are a lot of characters involved in it, of whom Pope is one of the most prominent but certainly not the only one.

We could also talk about Samuel Johnson, for example, and Oliver Goldsmith.

>>12028333

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>>11994966
>>11995712
Calm down, fuckers, Johnson says you're both beautiful and worthy of love.

Pope's near-contemporary Johnson also doesn't get enough respect on /lit/.

The English Enlightenment, in general, is a fantastic era of great writers and poets.

Is he really the only great literary critic in the English language?

>>11442173
Well I happen to think overthrowing the Stuarts was a mistake, so I take a somewhat dim view of Burke. It seems a little hypocritical of him to laud the overthrow of one monarchy and be horrified at the overthrow of another. Sure, you can say the circumstances in France were different than those in England, but the impulse of the latter is not as far from the former as Burke would like us to think, as I'm sure Johnson would have agreed.

I have a copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson. The actual biography itself is 1006 pages, and there are additional hundreds of pages of backnotes, a catalog of important persons, and some essays at both the front and the back. It's the one true doorstopper I possess, even bigger than Ulysses.

In Johnson's "Life of Pope," he repeatedly praises what he calls Pope's 'judgment.' Anyone have any great insight on what he's talking about? I get that it has to do with Pope's ability to decide what to put into a poem and what not to put in, and what to release and what not to release. But is there more to it than that?

>>11343762
>Addison

What's interesting is that Johnson himself knows how indebted he is to Addison. The Rambler is built off the model of the Spectator. Johnson also does great justice by Addison in his Lives of the Poets, with his "Life of Addison."

But I feel like Johnson goes beyond Addison, in the end. I feel like Johnson's less of a dilettante than Addison and Steele. Johnson seems to want to get at the core problems that perennially afflict mankind. This is why his Rambler essays are still so useful after centuries.

>>11246803
Yes, and the 18th Century is the golden age of English prose. Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, all sorts of writers from that period created a style that's never been equaled.

>It has been therefore said, without an indecent hyperbole, by one of his encomiasts, that in reading Paradise Lost we read a book of universal knowledge. But original deficience cannot be supplied. The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harrassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

Is he right?

Actually, Samuel Johnson argued that the canonicity of a work of literature could be determined by the will of the people, but only after a while. He talks about this in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is great, says Johnson, because more than 150 years have passed (Johnson was writing in the middle of the 18th Century) since his death, and anybody that would have had some interested motive in praising him is now long dead, yet he still is praised and loved. Thus, there must be some merit to his work that is transcendent.

So she's both write and wrong. It is the opinion of the people that determines what establishes the canon... but you have to wait to see what the people keep on reading as time passes.

>>10972465
>Burke
>conservative

Burke's a fucking Whig, m8, he's not a conservative. If you want a conservative, you want Johnson. They actually used to argue all the time.

>Boswell's Life of Johnson

Well, I suppose they'll all be good conversationalists.

>stoicism

http://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/stoicism-necessity-patience/